Innehållsförteckning för Issue 78 - Spring 2019 från Cinema Scope

Barbara Loden re-emerges in fragments. Caught in a 1965 snapshot from street photographer Garry Winogrand, she cuts across a wedge of city sunlight; tufts of windblown hair halo her wary face as one high heel steps just out of frame. Elusive, she fascinates—a female flâneur frozen in the shimmering afterlife of a gelatin silver print. “I spent every day just walking and walking,” Loden said of her early New York years, “and I didn’t really know what I was going to do.” Decades later, in 2002, when the picture is mass-produced as a 37-cent photogravure stamp commemorating Winogrand, not Loden, she is already dead. “The image is ghostlike,” wrote Susan Loden in a press release identifying her sister, who, as the actor-writer-director of Wanda (1970)—the independently produced classic newly released…

It’s outrageous that it should have taken this long for Angela Schanelec to make it into the Competition of the Berlinale—and ironic, given that it was a review of her film Passing Summer (2001), published in Die Zeit, that originated the term “Berliner Schule.” That film landed in the festival’s Forum sidebar, as did Afternoon (2007) and Orly (2010), and it’s only Schanelec’s eighth full-length feature, I Was at Home, But…, that finally got her invited into the main slate. She went on to win the Silver Bear for Best Director, making her the latest Berlin Schooler—after Maren Ade (Everyone Else, 2009), Ulrich Köhler (Sleeping Sickness, 2011), and Christian Petzold (Barbara, 2012)—to nab a silver statuette from a festival that has always had a fraught relationship with the group. Schanelec…

It’s one of the most cunning ironies in Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam (2018) that just beyond the edges of the screen that dominates the protagonist’s existence is… another frame. It’s one of those chintzy, gilded affairs that an earlier generation of art enthusiasts used to spruce up velvet Elvis paintings, Margaret Keane knockoffs, and other garage-sale treasures; you’d also find them around mirrors in hotels you never visit twice. Here, it encases a super-sized monitor, thereby turning the room’s most conspicuous piece of tech (which itself is topped by the camera that sends the heroine’s own image out into the world) into another emblem of cutesy, knowing artifice. So it fits right in with the fauxfur-covered objects that fill the faux-personal space where the film’s ill-fated cam-girl Alice,…

“I didn’t intentionally try to reinforce the optimism in my films. All I can say is some of the central characters get the chance to survive at the end. However, the continued survival of these people won’t change a thing. The world still runs its course.”—Ringo Lam in a 2014 interview Nicknamed the “dark-faced god” of Hong Kong filmmaking for his tantrum-throwing intensity and restrictive regime on set, Ringo Lam has proven mortal after all. One of the greatest directors of car chases, conflicted characters, and society coming apart at the seams, Lam died in the last days of 2018 at age 63, while resting at home with a cold. His early death cut short a somewhat beleaguered career just as he was getting back on track: Lam had just…

Frank Beauvais’ first feature Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle opens with a title card stating that the film we’re about to see is solely comprised of clips from over 400 movies that the 49-year-old French filmmaker watched between April and October of 2016. Separated from his partner and mourning the loss of his father, Beauvais holed up in his home in a remote village in Alsace and immersed himself in cinema. Speaking in voiceover, he describes the process: “Three, four, even five films a day. Anything goes. I can’t stop…I literally sink into others’ films…I go to bed, and I start again the next day.” To say that seeing Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle in the context of the Berlinale, a festival especially conducive to watching…

The outrage that (rightfully) greeted the Cinémathèque française’s 2017 retrospective dedicated to director Dorothy Arzner laid bare the doublethink that continues to haunt our attempts to properly celebrate women filmmakers. In film notes and a curator’s statement that were grossly under-researched and inaccurate at best, misogynist and homophobic at worst, Philippe Garnier managed to offer such charming sentiments as contending that Arzner only ascended the ranks of Hollywood directors because she possessed “fuck-you money” from her family, and that her films appealed mostly to “militant lesbians.” The retrospective’s presenting partner, the French feminist film festival Créteil Films de Femmes, understandably requested that Garnier’s notes not be published (the Cinémathèque declined), and a host of film historians and critics, including Arzner’s biographer Judith Mayne, offered their own appalled responses to the…

Few documentarians have made a more visceral case against humanity’s virus-like incursion into the planet as has Jennifer Baichwal. The Canadian nonfiction filmmaker has long been a large-scale image-maker in a country with a decidedly humbler realist tradition, her work defined by maximalist tableaux and geopolitically tangled narratives that, despite their frequent focus on the process of artists, tend toward the macro rather than the micro. Recently that penchant for the sprawling has seen Baichwal burrowing into the large canvas of the Earth to examine the way our intrepid but callous species can’t help but muck up whatever spaces it fills. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is Baichwal’s latest push-pull attraction to the catastrophic sublime. Another collaboration with cinematographer and producer Nicholas de Pencier and Baichwal’s one-time subject, photographer Edward Burtynsky…

Since her passing in 1999, the Scottish poet, filmmaker, and visual artist Margaret Tait has become more visible and celebrated than she ever was in her lifetime, her modesty and reticence now replaced by the zeal of the many academics, curators, and archivists who have set about exploring and restoring her diverse body of work. This reclamation has been spearheaded most notably by Sarah Neely, who has established herself as the pre-eminent academic authority on Tait, and by the artist’s husband Alex Pirie, who provided much of the materials for the restoration project: Janet McBain and Alan Russell of the Scottish Screen Archive recalled how Pirie delivered a collection of 150 cans of film between October 1999 and October 2000, taking the overnight ferry across the Pentland Firth and arriving…

In January of this year, Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Hanagatami surfaced on the streaming service MUBI, a year after its Rotterdam premiere and over four decades after the director’s debut feature Hausu (1977) hit Japanese cinemas. Such distribution details are worth noting because, despite a career of remarkable, enviable prolificacy, the 81-year-old Obayashi remains largely unknown outside his home country. Apart from Hausu’s belated North American run in 2010—the foundation of its current cult status—almost none of his 40 or so features has received a proper stateside release. For most audiences in the US (and likely elsewhere), Obayashi’s career begins and ends with a film about a house that devours a group of schoolgirls. Though this is perhaps just a quirk of history, it’s unfortunate all the same, as Obayashi’s body of…

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.”—Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism “You can’t choose between life and death when we’re dealing with what is in between.”—Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein), Poltergeist (1982) Writing in Millennium Film Journal in 2014, cultural critic Ara Osterweil proposed that American artist James Turrell’s careerlong Light and Space project is not only kindred with experimental film, but could rescue the cinema from mounting fears of its impending extinction and bury the theoretical obsessions with medium specificity that have obscured its redemptive potential. Divorced from market-dictated determinations, his work extricates…

“There is something in borders and frontiers that magnetically draws me to them, while of course the utopia of a world in which these absurd divisions don’t exist is always on my mind,” pondered Jocelyne Saab in one of her last films, Imaginary Postcards (2015). This musing thought pretty succinctly sums up Saab’s artistic ethos, based as it was in a conscious understanding of division coupled with a humanism devoid of illusions. After completing her studies in economic sciences at the Sorbonne, Saab worked on a pop-music radio show before being hired by the Lebanese-American poet and artist Etel Adnan to work as a journalist and television newsreader. Unlike most war reporters, who must travel to war zones to pursue their profession, war came to Saab’s native Lebanon in 1975,…

I had been living in Berlin for a year when, in 2012, I received an email with the subject line, “bigtime.” The email read, “Since you mentioned Die Halbstarken you should really watch this documentary that was filmed a year after the Wall came down,” and came with a Vimeo link. Someone had uploaded the entire Berlin Prenzlauer Berg – Encounters Between 1st of May and 1st of July 1990, a 75-minute-long documentary by German director Petra Tschörtner and one of the last works produced by the GDR’s film institute, the DEFA, in 1991. The film Die Halbstarken mentioned in the email—in English, Teenage Wolfpack, by Georg Tressler—was the East German response to Rebel Without a Cause. Released in 1956 to critical and public acclaim, it prompted the DEFA to…

Following on the heels of his two biggest-budget films to date, High-Rise (2015) and Free Fire (2016), Ben Wheatley has made something of a homecoming with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, which is appropriate considering that the film centres on a family reunion. Whereas Wheatley’s two previous pictures were highly conceptual and oriented around stylized set pieces, Burstead is closer to the films that first marked the director as a serious talent, and, indeed, proves that this is a mode he’s far more comfortable with. Back is the punchy, semi-improvisational quality of Down Terrace (2009) and Kill List (2011), as well as the latter’s leading man Neil Maskell playing the eponymous Colin, whose predicament—while less grim than that of the actor’s jowly hitman Jay in List—is nevertheless far from enviable,…

Canadians don’t do sequels. Or at least we don’t do them that often: Don Shebib went Down the Road Again again in 2011, and Bruce McDonald got the band back together for Hard Core Logo 2 (2010); commercially oriented hits like Fubar (2002) and Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006) have been profitable enough to justify follow-ups. For the most part, though, ours is a cinema of self-contained, one-and-done narratives, geographically proximate but industrially and temperamentally separate from the franchise mentality of American studio moviemaking. But in the past few years, there has been a small cycle of interesting Canadian films whose creators eschew the conventions of sequels while still productively reusing or repurposing characters or scenarios, including Philippe Lesage’s skillful diptych Les démons (2015) and Genèse (2018), linked by the…

Rare these days is the filmmaker who proclaims that cinema is firstly a medium of ideas rather than of images and sounds, and few have made the case as strongly as James N. Kienitz Wilkins. For the better part of the past decade, the 35-year-old New Yorkbased artist has occupied a singular position on the periphery of American independent filmmaking. His films—four features and seven short works for cinema, installation, and even planetarium (The Dynamic Range, 2018)—fail to easily place him within any particular scene or tradition. A classmate of Gabriel Abrantes and Alexander Carver’s at Cooper Union, he has, like them, straddled the film and art worlds; within the film festival context, he has moved freely between narrative and strictly experimental sections, not quite a new member of the…

“Some people work without a public relations man/and do their best work, babe, out of sight…”—Lou Reed, “No Money Down” When I was in college in Sarasota, Florida, a group of six artists called the Performers Workshop Ensemble came through my school for a week-long residency. They were involved in poetry, theatre, and particularly in new music composition. I discovered that they were a collective based in Urbana, Illinois, and they taught as a group at the University of Illinois, despite only one of them drawing a faculty salary. (They split his money amongst them.) They also staged various plays, concerts, and poetry readings around town. I spent some time in their orbit in Urbana, mostly writing performance-art pieces, and I learned a great deal from them. But what I…

From A to B and Back Again. Given that “A” is “Andy,” what might count as a suitable “B”? In the context of the book of Warhol’s “philosophy” bearing that subtitle, it was literal: the Factory superstar Brigid Berlin and Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello, the other halves of the conversations which provided much of the book’s raw material. In the context of the Whitney’s large-scale retrospective of Warhol’s work, which borrows that title, it might be understood as something like “whatever Andy liked”: the constant relay between Andy and the individuals and objects he gave the peculiar glamour called “Warhol” to and which in turn sustained his outrageous productivity, a tight cycle which spun until his body broke down, as all machines do, on February 22, 1987. But here,…

Sundance, measured by the sheer volume of movies premiered and bought and sent into the global distribution pipeline, is the most powerful film festival in the US and now a close second in North America to TIFF. A festival with that kind of power isn’t the place to expect surprises. Its operational structure hums like a finely tuned German vehicle: hardy volunteers wrapped against the frigid Wasatch Mountains winter are unerringly polite and helpful; few if any screenings start late or are tripped up by technical problems; everything, down to the size of the pocket guide, has been thought out to the last detail. How then can an organization be so exceptionally well-run, attentive to the granular level, and then be so slack on the programming side of the equation?…

In 2014, the Chinese government first outlined its plans for a “social credit system,” a massive project that utilizes various data-collection tools to rank the good standing of the country’s citizens, set to be fully implemented by 2020. Undertaken with a goal to “strengthen social sincerity and stimulate mutual trust in society,” many experts have flagged the project’s obvious and extreme risks to civil liberties and freedom of expression. While not explicit, this context of steadily pervasive state surveillance and social assessment informs China-born, US-based filmmaker Zhu Shengze’s feature-length documentary Present.Perfect., winner of the Tiger Award at the 2019 Rotterdam Film Festival. Assembled entirely out of footage broadcast on various Chinese live-streaming platforms, Zhu’s film begins with a reference to another Chinese state intervention: the 2017 Cybersecurity Law, which has…

To appreciate the historical scope and layered references of Denis Côté’s Répertoire des villes disparues, we would do well to begin before the film does, at a time when some of the apparitions that haunt Irénée-les-Neiges, the film’s fictional northern Québec setting, would have existed as flesh and bone. Between 1944 and 1959, Québec Premier Maurice Duplessis inaugurated a regime of anti-labour and pro-Catholic politics now referred to as La Grande Noirceur (“the Great Darkness”), which saw a favouring of rural economies over urban industries and state-sanctioned Catholicism over secular forms of governance and education. Along with these publicly enforced prejudices against an increasingly urban, industrialized, and diverse society came an enduring interest in a literary mode that came to be known as the roman du terroir: novels, often romances,…

“Like news reports of wartime Japan, films with stories or a precise structure throw images at an audience with their meanings already intact. Rather than making films with my own imposed structure, my method is to abandon structure altogether or, in other words, layer images that once embodied meaning on top of one another until they become unintelligible.”—Makino Takashi Grain or rain? A grey, acid shower is pelting down onscreen; perhaps several layers or overlain lattices of pelt. It looks a bit like the rain in Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (1926), bright and brittle against black night, but what exactly it is that’s pelting is unclear. Scratches on emulsion? Runnels of gouges on clear leader? Perhaps multiples of each, along with action-painting splotches. Within or perhaps behind the rain,…