Innehållsförteckning för Issue 79 - Summer 2019 från Cinema Scope

“What’s so great about Doris Wishman?” Doris Wishman asks Peggy Ahwesh in a quintessentially irascible Wishmanian gesture, simultaneously a self-negation and a demand for affirmation, even if one can’t tell exactly which. One extended reply to the question is found in the recently reprinted zine The Films of Doris Wishman (Light Industry/Inpatient Press), edited and produced by experimental filmmaker Ahwesh. A long-time devotee of Wishman, Ahwesh made the zine in 1995 as an accompaniment to screenings she curated in San Francisco at the Roxie Cinema and the Other Cinema. Made with a print run of only 75 copies, it featured program notes, an interview excerpt with Wishman, drawings, ad mat images from film pressbooks, quotes, and essays on the films by Keith Sanborn, Blossom Lefcourt, Joel Shepard, and Ahwesh. Ahwesh…

The pace and amount of change battering down not only the doors of Cannes but cinema as a whole, especially as it relates to production, distribution, and issues of diversity—all of this, of course, ramifications of external, global changes—means that comparing the make-up of the present festival to, say, five years past is a task best left to historians as opposed to critics; we little zombies have a hard enough time keeping up from one day to the next. And Cannes is doing its best to help us forget: we are living in a new era of openness, with steps being taken to get to 50/50, including a woman literally at the top of the Lumière steps for the marche, and the festival actually announcing the members of the festival…

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ongoing quest to sound out the tensions of contemporary Brazil takes a turn at once more strident and more oblique in Bacurau, an exhilaratingly jittery mash-up of genres and moods co-directed with Juliano Dornelles, the production designer for his two previous features. While the unlikely surface attractions of this third trip to the Brazilian northwest include flying saucers, a school named after a certain “João Carpenterio,” and a snarling Udo Kier, there can be no denying the film’s political intentions, as a line in the sand is drawn between past and near future that neatly skewers the present along the way. Even before Teresa (Bárbara Cohen) arrives back home in Bacurau for her grandmother Carmelita’s funeral, her journey in the local water truck has been rich in…

“I understand that, at the time, [Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc] was a small revolution, but now I only see all the actors’ horrible buffooneries, terror-stricken grimaces that make me want to flee.”—Robert Bresson, Cahiers du Cinéma 13 (1957) I’ve exited the last several Bruno Dumont films wondering—only somewhat in jest—whether or not their maker had gone completely insane. Until 2014, Dumont was notorious for his straight-faced, neo-Bressonian, severely severe dramas that interrogated the intersection of spiritualism and material form. It’s been said that it was this moment, inaugurated by the four-part TV miniseries P’tit Quinquin, that he “lightened up,” but it’s become clear that this step into ostensible comedy was a lateral move rather than a stark about-face. Indeed, in the funniest of these recent projects—Quinquin, its sequel Coincoin…

At the risk of being too whimsical even by the standards of what one may rightly expect of an animated feature based on a novel by the co-writer of Amélie (2001), the central conceit in Jérémy Clapin’s J’ai perdu mon corps could have easily gone sideways if not for the success of one key performance. Indeed, the expressiveness, nuance, and poignancy achieved by that performer, despite some obvious limitations, may be the biggest reason why Clapin’s debut feature enjoyed such a rapturous reception at Cannes, where its well-deserved triumphs included the Nespresso Grand Prize at the Semaine de la Critique and something even more coveted: a worldwide Netflix sale. The character is of course the one to whom we would attribute the titular plea even though it is unable to…

No one would call it “the show we need right now,” but HBO’s Succession—which centres on Murdochian media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his fuck-up progeny—pushes past wealth-porn TV and into the realm of true drama. Creator Jesse Armstrong previously collaborated with Armando Iannucci on the BBC series The Thick of It and its feature-film sequel In the Loop (2009), a satire of British politics that suggested that the most successful players in that arena were not cunning sharks but craven and weak individuals, only some of whom were loud enough bullies to disguise it. In Succession, Cox’s Logan discovers that his son and heir apparent, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), is one such beta male, unprepared for the challenge of running the media empire he’s built, and so goes back…

It is, it seems, the End of the World as We Know It. Forty-two years after R.E.M. wrote the West’s definitive apocalypse-now anthem, the song’s essentially optimistic subtext has become even more sharply doubleedged: its parenthetical proviso can be interpreted as much as a sign of denial as resignation, a means of keeping any anticipatory psychic torment at bay. This may be why those most convinced of the existence and impending effects of climate change can sound as cozily disengaged as the ones who laugh or scoff it off, if not even more so. If we take the scriptures (via Morrissey) at their word that in the midst of life, we are in death, et cetera, then a failure to fully acknowledge—and, accordingly, to act—on all those highly educated guesses…

“Mosquitoes begin to hum, toads commence to leap; serpents hiss. Lightnings flicker. Hail falls. Then come gusts, bearing with them marvelous anatomies: Heads of alligators with hoofs of deer; owls with serpent tails; swine with tiger-muzzles; goats with the crupper of an ass; frogs hairy as bears; chameleons huge as hippopotami; calves with two heads, one bellowing, the other weeping; foetuses of quadruplets holding one another by the navel and spinning like tops; winged bellies flitting hither and thither like gnats.”—Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony Undersung filmmaker Ken Kobland’s strange, sumptuous slice of classically minded surrealism, Flaubert Dreams of Travel But the Illness of His Mother Prevents It, created in 1986 in collaboration with The Wooster Group (America’s experimental-theatre ensemble extraordinaire) is, too, a creature born from Flaubert’s…

Ryan Ermacora and Jessica Johnson’s Empire Valley (2018) opens with a wide-angle shot of a boulder surrounded by an imperfect circle of gravel, and then long dry grasses, pale green brush, and the easy swells of an arid landscape. The feet of two extremely prepared day trekkers, sporting knee-high boots with big buckles, make their way onto the screen. They follow the prescribed path that circles the monolith in the familiar manner of those who take themselves to unfamiliar places simply to look around. One gets low with her bulky DSLR to capture a vantage of this seemingly unremarkable stone; the other gently fingers the surface of its unseen other side, and soon, the photographer reaches her hand out to do it, too. Though its pseudo-museological framing is never explained…

In the first scene of Julia Reichert’s first film, Growing Up Female (co-directed with Jim Klein, 1971), a woman takes the hand of a young girl, walks her down the front steps of a house, and guides her along an Ohio sidewalk, the girl moving along as though in a trance, taking in the world in all its strangeness. On the soundtrack, Reichert’s voice narrates, “Society teaches us that when we reach the age of 21, we are free to live our lives as we choose. But by the time a woman comes of age, what choices does she really have?” The image of two women holding hands—a small gesture of solidarity—contrasted with this calm yet direct appraisal of the oppressive forces beyond their control neatly encapsulates the plainspoken yet…

Precisely a decade after his last film shot and produced in South Korea, Bong Joon Ho returns to a place that feels both familiar and unfamiliar with his Palme d’Or-crowned Parasite. Moving beyond the ambitious, overly conceptual, and uneven international co-productions Snowpiercer and Okja, Parasite feels like a movie that only could have been made after such an awkward foray into globalized filmmaking. Slipping comfortably back into his domain with effortless mastery and a palpable sense of urgency that makes for less of a homecoming than a home-reckoning, Bong builds on his thematic obsessions of class division, societal dysfunction, and the family unit, yet does so in a perpetual state of surprise. Twists and turns aside, this surprise comes more from Parasite’s very make-up: the formal strategies, tonal malleability, and…

In conversations addressing the plight of what was once known as the “Third World,” one of the central debates still involves the inevitable tension between nationalism—as well as the quest for national identity—and the rather amorphous concept known as “cosmopolitanism.” In the Palestinian intellectual milieu, the work of the late Edward Said exemplified an effort to balance serious engagement with the Palestinian cause and a cosmopolitanism generated by intellectual rigour and a certain intellectual distance. Defying stereotypes associated with Palestinian militants, Said embraced “worldliness” and secularism. He also emphasized the salutary virtues of exile and celebrated the exilic life as “a model for the intellectual who is tempted, and even beset and overwhelmed, by the rewards of accommodation, yea-saying, settling in.” On a superficial level, Elia Suleiman, whose new film…

In Abel Ferrara’s latest feature, presented in Cannes as a Special Screening, Tommaso (Willem Dafoe) is introduced perfecting his Italian-language skills with a local tutor. Tommaso is not only a little older than your usual student, but also already pretty fluent, able to have a regular conversation with ease and even enthusiasm. Right off the top, Ferrara and Dafoe paint an irresistible picture of a kind and curious outsider, eager to learn about the European country he lives in so as to better fit in, and smiling and cracking jokes at every opportunity: the opposite of an ugly American. In these first scenes, Tommaso appears as goodness incarnate. At his regular café, he orders in Italian and is chummy with the staff, popping in for a minute to drink an…

It may seem puzzling that a film about a young man’s agonizing, relentless search for his father should be called Nuestras Madres (Our Mothers). Yet as we come to realize in César Díaz’s Caméra d’Or-winning debut feature, the two are inversely linked. The key point of Nuestras Madres, in fact, is that the absence of a father can loom so large that it obscures the mother’s presence. It is only towards the end of Díaz’s nuanced, dexterously acted, and at times very sombre character study that the bond between mother and son can finally reconfigure itself, its importance fully acknowledged. The protagonist of Nuestras Madres is Ernesto (Armando Espitia), a forensic anthropologist investigating mass graves in Guatemala, the result of years of brutal warfare between the military regime and guerrilla…

“There are no painters like Mr. Michelangelo, not anymore,” muses a lovably dense soccer star in the dreamy and borderline farcical opening moments of Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s debut feature Diamantino. The inventive, genre-hopscotching fable’s overture whisks us down from some dodgy CG images of the cosmos to a simultaneously more mundane and more impressive drone survey of a contemporary sort of Sistine Chapel, a soccer stadium. There we find the eponymous athlete and narrator, played by Carloto Cotta, about to take a shot that will put his views on the sublimity of his particular art form to the test. As he moves in to strike, the generic TV-match direction and cinematography gives way to celestial camp, with pink dust and clouds filling the screen as Diamantino is dwarfed…

There’s a pervasive hum that runs through Andrés Duque’s body of work, a strange overtone that simmers just at the threshold of our hearing. Thirty-five minutes into Dress Rehearsal for Utopia (2012), the soundtrack seems to drop out and is replaced by a faint, barely perceptible buzz. It sounds like a slightly crunchier form of tape hiss—a kind of “deliberate mistake” that persists even as we see musicians playing without sound, bodies dancing to unheard music. In Karelia: International With Monument (2018), idyllic images of the Karelian forests are accompanied by a faint electronic drone, evoking the hum of mosquitos or, perhaps, a more ghostly presence. The soundtrack to the short sciencefiction film Bartleby’s Constellation (2007) is constantly humming with Theremin whines and harmonica drones, machine grind, and fuzzy signals…

“I am forever indebted to cinema,” wrote singer-songwriter Scott Walker in 2007. “It’s always been there for me in all manner of ways. I would not have lived my life here in Europe without it. Now and then I’ve found myself wandering in dark towns or cities rather like those depicted by Kaurismäki. Have turned a corner and there was salvation looming before me in the form of a movie house. They all seemed to have a late-night screening of The Third Man (1949), but what could be better?” Walker (née Noel Scott Engel), who passed away from cancer this March at age 76, was a unique figure in the field of pop music. Having risen to early fame as one-third of The Walker Brothers (none of them brothers, and…

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes; if we opened me up, we’d find beaches,” says Agnès Varda in her anti-memoir Les plages d’Agnès (2008), which, characteristically, is far more about other people than it is about herself. Varda’s films look closely and generously at what we had forgotten to know, and listen intently to people who would otherwise have walk-on parts: women and men glimpsed on park benches and in hospital queues, on sidewalks and in shipyards. Varda, who died in March at the age of 90, made a cinema that was at once in conversation with her nouvelle vague contemporaries and yet entirely her own. In her only book, Varda par Agnès, she writes that in her films she sought to merge the intimate sensibility of her…

In 2012, when French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop pitched her anticipated debut feature Atlantique as part of Locarno’s Open Doors initiative, the film went by the title Fire Next Time. While much in the film has changed in the time between its initial conception and its recent Grand Prix as part of the Cannes Competition, it’s worth considering the words that precede the abandoned title in its original Biblical citation (by way of an American Civil Warera spiritual): No more water. While set on land, water reappears constantly throughout Atlantique, its presence at times blissful and dreamlike, at other times nightmarish. Diop punctuates her film’s narrative with extended shots of the sun or moon reflecting on the slow, rippling waves of the Atlantic Ocean, and while her editing suggests that the…

Abdellatif Kechiche certainly doesn’t bow to pressure. After his purportedly candid portrait of lesbian sexuality in the Palme d’Or-winning La vie d’Adèle (2013) was accused of representing but a thinly veiled masturbatory fantasy, he doubled down with Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (2017), a rhapsodic, unabashedly hormonal chronicle of youths in heat. After that film’s detractors complained about the slender narrative and attacked him for leering at women’s posteriors, and its champions generally agreed that the film’s overlong club scene was a weak point, he returns with Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo, which has even less plot, even more ass, and spends three of its three-and-a-half hours in that same club. As his compatriots would say, il a du culot—with special emphasis on the cul. I promise to refrain from further…

The 51st edition of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs marked the first under the stewardship of Italian curator Paolo Moretti, who replaces former delegate general Edouard Waintrop following the latter’s seven-year reign as head of Cannes’ most prominent parallel program. Over the course of Waintrop’s solid if unspectacular tenure, the Quinzaine seemed to settle comfortably into its standing as a clearing house for auteur films generally thought to have been either passed over by the official selection committee (rightly or wrongly), or not paid much mind at all due to affiliations with this or that style or genre or subject. (Indeed, Waintrop programmed more genre films during his tenure than the section had ever previously seen.) As a result, the Quinzaine remains crucial to adding diversity and dimension to a festival…

I wouldn’t wish living in times like these on anyone. This, of course, is the irony of the title of Ralph Rugoff’s exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale, “May You Live in Interesting Times.” On the surface, the phrase reads as a blessing; actually, it is a curse. Add to this the fact that this supposed “Chinese saying” is nothing of the kind, and you wind up with a double falseness conveyed in only six words. Ironic bemusement feels like the most useless and inappropriate of sensibilities today, yet here we are. Last time around, Christine Macel’s “Viva Arte Viva” was widely panned for its spurious humanism, retrograde conception of art, and whiteness. Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery since 2006, has taken a very different path, but the results…

Given the evidence of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), time isn’t kind to moviemakers who decide to leap into autobiography: too often, such an endeavour entails rampant solipsism, a romanticization of history, and getting the practice of moviemaking (and cinema itself) entirely wrong. When they too gave in to the impulse to look in the mirror, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard took the craftier route of the auto-essay, a gambit that allows the artist to simultaneously author the work and get out of the way. Here, the voice of the author in direct exchange with the audience replaces the dramatized, unavoidably phony version of the author’s life; a conversation takes the place of an ego trip (or as much as one can ever have…

If the prerogatives of a democratically elected or militarily established government can be discerned in its early days—that critical moment when those matters deemed most pressing are promptly and swiftly dealt with—then the intentions of the 1973 military junta in Chile were made amply apparent by its first initiative: the systematic rounding up and slaughter of thousands of leftists. On September 12, 1973, the day after the military and national police ousted the country’s socialist president Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup, activist, pedagogue, and folk singer Victor Jara was arrested at Santiago’s State Technical University and taken to nearby Chile Stadium, where he was tortured (all of his fingers were severed), ridiculed (soldiers taunted him that, now, he’d never play guitar again), and then killed (40 bullets were found…