Innehållsförteckning för Issue 81 - Winter 2020 från Cinema Scope

Some of the greatest concert footage from the ’70s has only become visible over the course of the previous 12 months, and ended up in two films that couldn’t be more different in their approaches, yet are united in presenting themselves as auteurist conundrums. In both cases this also has to do with their convoluted production histories: Amazing Grace finally presents long-unavailable material shot during a legendary live album recording by Aretha Franklin; Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese is best described as a somewhat ironic revision of Dylanshot material, some of which had previously been featured in a notorious film maudit which—in a postmodern gambit characteristic of Scorsese’s “Dylanesque” smoke-and-mirrors approach—goes unnamed. So, in one corner, we have Amazing Grace, a seemingly straightforward record of…

Ja’Tovia Gary’s filmmaking is all to some extent grappling with the question of identity, particularly its precariousness in an often hostile world. Early films such as Cakes Da Killa: No Homo (2013) and An Ecstatic Experience (2015) explore the complex histories of African-American life, in particular the role of art and storytelling in establishing stable identities across time. But her latest film is itself possessed of a somewhat mutable, even uncertain identity. The official title of the film is The Giverny Document (Single Channel), which seems to imply that at some future point, The Giverny Document may be reconfigured for a multi-channel gallery installation. This has not happened yet, and I’d be curious to see what such a reorganization of the material might add to the fundamental power of the…

Now, let us imagine the watchmen of twin poles. One asks, “How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’” The other responds, “D’autre part le cinéma est un langage.” Let us station the latter at the North, alone and nearest to God, and the former at the South, frolicking in exotic domestic bliss amongst the penguins. Their quarrel is theoretically indefinite. Somewhere between, in constant, ghostly motion on the high seas, is a ship captained by a sailor of many names. As the hero of his cine-roman à clef, he is called Magellan. In his vegetable form, a grand and gregarious aspiration, Stropharia cubensis (or, in keeping with the subsequent judgment of a perspicacious German, Psylocibe cubensis). Professionally, in homage to…

For a film that reveals its formal conceit from the outset and never deviates, Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle is remarkably complicated. Frank Beauvais’ first feature-length work opens with a simple intertitle, stating that he watched over 400 films between April and October 2016 and that the footage to be seen is taken from them. What follows is exactly that, with said footage shorn of its original sound and augmented only by a voiceover spoken by Beauvais and occasional pieces of black leader. Yet describing the combined effects of this unadorned set-up is exhilaratingly complicated. Essay film, documentary and collage; solitude, helplessness and anxiety: the personal and the collective; cinema itself—all are taken up, refracted, and bent back by the merciless flickering of the screen. Beauvais quickly explains…

Apart from extending the recent streak of exemplary features from directors grouped (sometimes contentiously) under the Berlin School banner, A Voluntary Year continues the Teutonic tradition of the auteurist small-screen work. A television commission for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), the film was co-written and co-directed by Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winckler, who were colleagues during their time at Hamburg’s School of Fine Arts. Forgoing the genre enticements that invigorate Christian Petzold’s entries into the long-running Polizeiruf 110 series or the prodigious oeuvre of Dominik Graf (arguably the most distinguished German director working largely outside theatrical exhibition), the film recalls Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016) by using a central father-daughter relationship to orchestrate an unpredictable, ever-shifting dynamic of freedom and control. But where Ade’s film is discursive and sprawling, Winckler and…

“We live surrounded with so many images. With so many images, with so many words, and so many feelings related to them.” —Marinella Pirelli, Narciso (1966-67) The recent exhibition at Milan’s Museo del Novecento, Light Movement: The Experimental Cinema of Marinella Pirelli (curated by Lucia Aspesi and Iolanda Ratti), has allowed for a long-overdue critical and institutional reassessment of a perennially underappreciated innovator of European experimental art—underappreciated perhaps partially because her work, in terms of both its content and the rate of its production, was marked by a gradual reduction, a steady move towards the minimal, the contained, and the intimate. Despite this, Pirelli’s moving-image work—spanning from the stop-motion animation Gioco di dama (1961-63) to Doppio autoritratto (1973-74), the radical self-portrait that heralded her final retreat from filmmaking—evinces an astonishing…

“Don’t get into the Nazi stuff,” Taika Waititi’s deadbeat dad tells his son, the eponymous protagonist of the New Zealand-born actor-writer-director’s sophomore feature Boy (2010), gesturing to a swastika he once carved into the wall of his childhood bedroom, the remnant of a reformed punk’s youthful exploits. Hindsight being 20/20, it’s almost as if the recent Marvel laureate is cautioning himself to not glibly trade in fascist iconography if he can help it, but with his admittedly inventive riff on Christine Leunens’ World War II novel Caging Skies, Waititi delivers on his Boy character’s dark prophecy, with predictably dicey results: in Jojo Rabbit, Waititi dives headlong into the Nazi stuff, pulling out an enervating human-interest story with darkly comic beats that have been overstated by the marketing campaign that pitched…

Mister America, in keeping with its associated web series On Cinema at the Cinema, treats the feature-film format as no more inherently worthy of respect than any other. In part this is owed to the accidental origin of the movie, which was conceived and shot in only three days as an extended segment of On Cinema, and later edited into an 88-minute feature and shopped to distributors. Magnolia Pictures acquired it for a series of one-night-only bookings around the country before releasing it to VOD, where a wider audience would have the opportunity to stumble across this entry point to the broad and perhaps intimidating On Cinema canon. On Cinema stars comedians Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington as Tim and Gregg, two opposite and often antagonistic characters bound together by…

While one might assume that it would be emotionally and morally gratifying to watch the funeral of a tyrant, Sergei Loznitsa’s astounding archival documentary State Funeral challenges that belief. Using magnificently restored footage (both black-and-white and colour) of the grandiose four-day affair that was the 1953 funeral of Joseph Stalin, Loznitsa immerses us in the spectacular pomp of a dictator’s cult of personality. Any sense of catharsis provided by the spectacle that marked the end of this reign, however, is overwhelmed by the impact of Stalin’s figure on display. The sight inspires fear as much as awe, for one can see in the commemoration of the dead dictator the projected, and subsequently embalmed, grandiosity of his life—a grandiosity enshrined on film by the monumental imagery shot by hundreds of cameramen,…

With five features, two mid-length films, and one video installation to her name over 24 years, Jessica Hausner has evolved from a maker of hermetic psychodramas to an internationally minded auteur whose meticulously detailed character portraits belie the breadth of their sociopolitical analysis. Her films, too often reduced by critics to austere exercises of the kind of studied severity so familiar to viewers of contemporary Austrian festival films, are far richer and more stylistically diverse than their immaculately composed surfaces let on: Hausner is the rare writer-director to utilize genre to articulate a fundamentally feminist existentialism. Her latest, the science-fiction parable Little Joe, is a particularly noteworthy example of her flair for reworking genre conventions. With ever-increasing ambition and formal rigour, she has slowly established herself as one of Europe’s…

As the opening credits of Alexander Nanau’s Collective rolled at a screening at TIFF, a fellow critic leaned to me and whispered, in a mantra-like tone, the name of an indelible Chinese documentary: Karamay. The implied message was tacitly understood: that Xu Xin’s colossal 2010 work on the aftermath of the eponymous Chinese fire (in which 325 people were killed, 288 of them schoolchildren) was the kind of landmark filmic memorial capable of speaking to tragedy of such a scale, the archetype to which a film like Collective might aspire, and invariably be diminished in comparison. Where Karamay is effectively a protracted vigil among the still grieving families of the deceased children, Collective operates in a less elegiac framework, acting as a disquisition into a venal Romanian healthcare system that…

Seventy-five years after the liberation of the camps, how do we remember the Holocaust? Those who lived through it won’t be around to testify for much longer, and in our era of viral disinformation, history must be considered up for grabs, alt-truths algorithmically tailored to suit your personal predilections. Audiences at TIFF and other festivals this fall were faced with an especially stark choice when it came to Holocaust Entertainment. On the one hand, there was Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit, a cute comedy about a lonely, sheltered Hitlerjugend whose imaginary friend is a wacky, cigarette-smoking Führer (played by Waititi himself); on the other, the harrowing and brutal The Painted Bird, a nearly three-hour Czech art film written, directed, and produced by Václav Marhoul from the novel by Jerzy Kosinski, which…

After 2019’s summer of scammers, from the fall of Elizabeth Holmes to the false starts of Caroline Calloway, the cold industrial winter of Hamilton feels particularly harsh. The glossy cautionary fables of the warmer months are long gone, and instead we have something on a smaller scale, a tale of the banality of privilege. As the grey morning light leaks into her basement apartment, Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl) goes through her morning routine. That our protagonist is a scammer isn’t a spoiler: Katie’s self-care routine involves shaving her head so she looks enough like a chemo patient to pass as one. Instead, directors Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis make White Lie less about the character of Katie as liar than the mechanisms through which she’s able to do so, how…

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work starts promisingly. The discussion of Sontag’s childhood and early youth in California is extremely detailed, so much so that one starts to understand why Moser needs 705 pages of text and another 111 pages of apparatus (including the index) to get the whole job done. As with Pauline Kael, it’s all too easy to ignore Sontag’s western background: the fact that she came to New York as a conscious choice and was never entirely at home in the city. This could serve as an explanation for Kael’s sustained crankiness and sometimes philistinish pose of anti-intellectualism; Sontag, on the other hand, seems to have allowed that “doesn’t quite belong to NYC” sensibility to lead her into a voracious cosmopolitanism, an altogether more agreeable result…

The artistic compromises that come with working on a mid-budget film like Ad Astra are inevitable. While it’s less money than the hundreds of millions that go into major studio blockbuster fare, it’s a significant jump from the more modest scope of James Gray’s prior work, including 2016’s putatively epic The Lost City of Z. With this increase in budget comes an increase in the risk of financial failure, and studio pushback on any of the project’s more challenging elements is to be expected. The question of what additions or changes were made to Ad Astra has been a matter of ongoing speculation, and Gray himself has not confirmed any specifics. In an interview with Little White Lies, he estimates that “90% of the movie” reflects his original vision for…

The very title of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu seeks to pin down the unpinnable: to fix a flame in place. Céline Sciamma’s 18thcentury romance centres on the innate slipperiness of condensing someone’s presence into oil on canvas, a process in which the act of rendering becomes an intimate exchange between an artist’s interpretation and her subject’s knowability—and one which, in the case of Sciamma’s painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), and her subject, Héloise (Adele Haenel), the daughter of a countess, sparks a growing affection. By telling her tale through Marianne’s flashback, Sciamma gives an otherwise conventional narrative device a pointed thematic charge: Marianne is not simply remembering events but trying to concretize them in her mind’s (painterly) eye, to fix the fleeting and ineffable currents of desire, the…

Since cinema is moving toward television, and since the MCU generation is trying to actually tussle with a good fella like Martin Scorsese, and since all of this is wrapped around a cultural moment steeped in glorious contradictions, the timing of The Irishman couldn’t be more perfect. A movie that embodies classical values of saga storytelling and reflective character study and shatters the frenetic machismo of Scorsese’s previous gangland epics—particularly his marvellous, unruly masterpiece, Casino (1995), and Goodfellas (1990)—The Irishman is both cinema and television in a fused form that suggests an artistic reconciliation for Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian. Funded by Netflix to the tune of something approaching the thin-air atmosphere of $200 million after all the studios passed (thanks to an expensive digital de-aging process for older actors…

Diamonds are sharp and hard, rich in myth and violence, soaked in desire, totally under the putrid spell of money. They are, in other words, a lot like Las Vegas—especially as it appears in Nina Menkes’ searing 1991 film Queen of Diamonds. Across 75 taut minutes, Sin City’s fabulous hedonism recedes from view, giving pride of place to the death and boredom that make up its core. A casino croupier, played by the director’s sister Tinka Menkes in the fourth of their six collaborations, drifts between work and home, down empty streets, to the ruined oasis of the Salton Sea, and through the night, usually filmed at some distance in static shots that resist psychologization. She is called Firdaus, Arabic for “paradise.” The name is borrowed from the title character…

Toronto in the ’70s was a mid-size Protestant town with a penchant for puritanical by-laws (you couldn’t buy a drink on a Sunday unless you were having a sit-down meal), which made it an unlikely home for a thriving artistic community devoted to the emerging practice of conceptual video art. Yet the very fact that the city was a blank slate, in cultural terms, also made it unusually conducive for the fledgling medium. As curator Peggy Gale recalls, Toronto at this time “was being invented by twentysomethings who saw the possibility of a new language of form and movement with no encumbering history and relatively few limitations.” The founding in 1971 of A Space Gallery and Trinity Square Video (both of which still exist today) provided production resources and exhibition…

There is an unprecedented element in the new Franco Maresco film, Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be (La Mafia non è più quella di una volta): the female element. For the first time in the 30-year career of the Sicilian director (with or without his former accomplice and cinematographer, Daniele Cipri), a woman takes a central place in front of the camera. Not to be mistaken for a politically correct concession to pink quotas (misanthropists like Maresco after all, one suspects, hate men and women equally), the presence of Letizia Battaglia, a feisty 83-year-old photographer who made her name by immortalizing the Mafia wars of the ’70s, acts as a counterbalance to Maresco’s deteriorating cynicism—not that the reality in front of his camera offers any antidote to…

William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s tenth and longest-serving prime minister, is an emblem of our nation’s repressed, ineffectual masculinity. A staunch centrist and bureaucrat, Mackenzie King accomplished little during his 22 years in office: his main contributions were his ability to win elections despite his apparent lack of charisma, and his power to maintain “Canadian unity” through “liberal corporatism,” the sort of waffling, lukewarm sentiment that continues to define Canada’s political consensus. But underneath Mackenzie King’s veneer of cold professionalism and unwavering rationality, there was a strange, disturbed, petulant soul; his nickname, the result of inconvenient posthumous revelations, fits him well: “Wacky Willy.” It is likely this duality that attracted Winnipeg’s Matthew Rankin, whose feature debut The Twentieth Century (which won the Best First Canadian Feature award at TIFF) presents…

Just a week before his death this past September, Colombian filmmaker Luis Ospina posted his final status update on Facebook: “Este remake de Todo comenzó por el fin que estoy viviendo no se lo recomiendo a nadie. Nunca segundas partes fueron mejores.” (“This remake of It All Started at the End that I’m living, I do not recommend to anyone. Sequels are never better.”) Ospina was referring to his 208-minute documentary from 2015, in which he turned the camera on himself while he was undergoing chemotherapy to treat a life-threatening gastrointestinal stomach tumour to reminisce on his life, his career, his hometown of Santiago de Calí—which, during his lifetime, transformed from a provincial sugar-harvesting and manufacturing city into the bohemian hub of Colombia’s southwest, as well as the base of…

A surreal, sensuous fever dream rendered in the most lurid shades and textures, In Fabric succeeds first and foremost as a tragicomedy about a cursed commodity. As he explores and regards his chosen nexus of eroticism and consumerism with a fervent mixture of desire, dread, and disgust, writer-director Peter Strickland performs many strange and beguiling feats. The most impressive may be his ability to satirize the operations of fetishism while crafting a fully realized fetish object himself. Indeed, if the day ever comes for Strickland to exploit his fourth feature’s merchandising potential and spin it off into an Etsy boutique, the selection of offerings will be incomparable. Like the phone-book-thick catalogue that showcases the wares at the film’s principal setting—a fictional shop named Dentley and Soper’s, located in the similarly…

Structurally ambiguous and romantically rancid, Peter Emanuel Goldman’s 1965 Pestilent City is a 15-minute, high-contrast black-and-white New York City scherzo of sleaze, dereliction, working stiffs, stumblebums, loitering, malingering, playing, and passing out, filmed in Times Square and along the Deuce during the area’s deleterious decline, halfway between Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Taxi Driver (1976). It sticks in your head and beads on your skin the way Sleazoid Express did the first time you read it. It’s like the omnipresent smell of piss in the New York City of the ’70s. Foul and beautiful and bare. Lauded by Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Godard while he was still carving a small niche in the independent/experimental New York film scene of the late ’60s, Goldman went on to various other careers…