Innehållsförteckning för Issue 64 från Cinema Scope

“I smiled in the moonlight at the docile thought of the mind’s helplessness in the face of overwhelming, confounding, entangling reality…No combination is impossible…Any combination is possible...” —Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos “The bird can’t hang itself.” Now that’s a thing we all can agree on, can’t we? Surely that little sparrow, inexplicably dangling on a blue wire from the branch of a tree, didn’t commit suicide—although later there will be mindboggling speculation that he was sacrificed by the other birds. This hardly qualifies as weird in the context of Cosmos, whose progression rigorously follows through such increasingly haphazard connections, befitting the belated conjunction of two major Polish surrealists: infamous iconoclast Andrzej Zulawski, returning after a 15-year hiatus from filmmaking to translate the final novel by Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) to the screen,…

In the exciting climax of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp—the eight-part Netflix prequel to David Wain’s 2001 cult comedy about a Jewish summer camp circa 1981 infested with horny teenagers portrayed by paunchy grown-up comedians— the counsellors face down none other than Ronald Reagan (played by co-creator Michael Showalter). The 41st President of the United States is on site to authorize a nuclear strike on the cabins, but, after a prolonged standoff, he calls off his troops and returns to Washington, humbled by the rhetoric of friendship and honour directed at him by the “unlikely group of misfits” (to quote the original Wet Hot American Summer) in front of him. They may not be able to field a competitive baseball team or keep their young charges from…

Absolute divisions between experimental film and other contemporary cinematic forms are less and less convincing, although one persistent point of differentiation is length. The majority of avant-garde films are under 60 minutes; most are well under 30. With the advent of digital image-making tools, many of the external limitations that keep films short are minimized. Nevertheless, the traditions of experimental filmmaking have sometimes privileged economy of expression over patient elaboration of a set of ideas. The two films I’m discussing below are impressive in their own right, and they have been showing at festivals since the beginning of this year. They are still being screened, which speaks both to their enduring quality and to the slower, more gradual rollout that tends to greet long-form experimental cinema on the circuit. This…

When it premiered in North American cinemas in 1961, Julian Roffman’s The Mask—released in the USA as Eyes of Hell, and returning to theatres this fall in a new digital restoration produced by TIFF and the 3-D Film Archive—was accompanied by a publicity campaign that touted the film’s cinematic “innovations” with a load of ballyhoo that boldly outdid the typically hyperbolic movie marketing of the era. After rebranding industry-standard 3D as “the miracle of Depth-Dimension” and promoting Myron Schaeffer’s early synth score as “Electro-Magic Sound,” the marketing shellac was laid on even thicker with the invitation for spectators to put on their own personal “Magic Mystic Mask”—a replica of the haunted artifact that transforms the film’s protagonist into a libidinous lunatic— with the intimation that what the audience would witness…

To dispense with the plodding plot stuff up front, Gregory Jacobs’ sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s mini-budget, maxi-box-office 2012 hit gets what’s left of the first film’s gang of Tampa-based “male entertainers” back together for that proverbial last big score. As the film opens, Magic Mike’s hard-bodied B-team (Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez, Matt Bomer, and Gabriel Iglesias), having recently been abandoned by their surrogate father-figure Dallas (Matthew McConaughey, sitting this one out), are planning one final blowout trip to the annual male stripper convention in Myrtle Beach before finally turning in their thongs. Easily coaxing Channing Tatum’s Mike away from his day job managing a small furniture company (for which he had abandoned the peeling game at the conclusion of the first installment), the boys hit the road—in an…

“In an early, 1960 survey of the then-nascent New American Cinema (NAC) movement, Jonas Mekas warned independent filmmakers of a regionally specific danger faced by artists working on the West Coast: ‘the shadow-killing and all leveling California sun.’…This early critique of Los Angeles cinema elucidates a distinctly heliophobic tendency structuring Mekas’ film criticism from this period: a fear of the violent and transformative impact of illumination, and particularly that suffered within the overexposed expanses of Los Angeles. While this fear is not exactly antithetical to the condition of cinephilia, it is nevertheless surprising to find a professional movie critic suffering from it, especially one better known for celebrating cinema as a mystical ‘art of light.’” That is scholar and programmer Josh Guilford, taking poor old Uncle Fishhook (Jack Smith’s pet…

There is no such thing as ambient sunlight in Bleak Street. The sun’s rays descend from high above, diffused by a latticework of electrical cables, metal stairs, frayed tarpaulin, and urban flotsam, or slam down in hard sheets through a grid of tall buildings and concrete canopies. A swaying, phantom-like camera, deepening the austerity through its black-and-white imagery, floats through crepuscular cantinas, cavernous hotels, and crumbling rooms, at once dingy and oddly tidy, through dank exterior pathways so narrow it’s as though the walls are truly closing in. Mexico City has never looked so much like a dungeon as it does in this, perhaps the most epitomizing work in director Arturo Ripstein’s five-decade filmography. And no single location in Bleak Street exemplifies its sense of confinement and inexorability so well…

As is true for many of the more interesting Italian filmmakers currently working outside of the country’s “thriving,” increasingly globalized film industry, Pietro Marcello’s films liberally fuse a range of verite and metaphysical elements to contemplate the evanescence of pre-modernized and rural culture. Introspective, class-conscious, and sensitive to (art) history, Marcello can be snugly positioned alongside contemporaries such as Michelangelo Frammartino, Simone Rapisarda Casanova, and Roberto Minervini (to name but a few), who thoughtfully carry over and update neorealist traditions for the 21st century without betraying the forms and sensibilities staked out in centuries prior. Of this emerging class of filmmakers, Marcello has been one of the more difficult to pin down. He received formal art training in painting at l’Accademia di Belle Arti, a craft that he started teaching…

One of the enduring problems of the cinema is that Andre Bazin’s answer to the question, “What is it?” is so convincing that he was able to pass off an ontology of one its modes, namely realism, as a sufficient description of the whole. Of course, the issue hardly begins with Bazin: since its inception, cinema has existed, with few exceptions, in a single, conservative form—one based on the “realism” of 24 frames per second as a common measure of photography and projection. Motion pictures were born at the moment of Impressionism and the realist novel, and the form of figuring the world found in La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (1895) is no more or less historically conditioned than that of the lilies or Bovary; and yet, exploration…

The Club, the fourth feature by Pablo Larrain, is set in a small town in coastal Chile. There’s an unassuming house in this town that the Catholic Church runs as an open prison for priests who have committed serious crimes, sheltering them from the prying eyes of society. One priest (Father Vidal) is a proud pedophile; a second (Father Silva) takes satisfaction that he used to aid the military in torturing prisoners; a third (Father Ortega) traded babies; and a fourth (Father Ramirez) is too senile to remember his sins. There is also a nun (Sister Monica) who is not really a nun, and who used to beat her adopted daughter. In their spare time, the priests train Rayo, a greyhound that competes at the local racetrack. In other word,…

The cinema of Alex Ross Perry is a cinema of facades. From the myriad of pseudophilosophical masks assumed by the cast of insecure males in Listen Up Philip (2014), to the secret shadowing the siblings at the centre of The Color Wheel (2011), to the physiological properties and personalities projected by the mentally distressed infantryman in Impolex (2009), each of Perry’s films portrays characters whose realities, as witnessed, betray just one of many possible truths. As such, these devices and defenses do not necessarily suggest disingenuousness on the part of either Perry or his subjects—if anything, these characters are too candid, while the director’s own sly puncturing of recognizable iterations of micro-budget indie motifs (facades in and of themselves) evince affection for their form, if not necessarily their function. In…

Soda Kazuhiro’s new documentary Oyster Factory is the Japanese director’s second film to open on a close-up of a cat. The first sequence of Peace (2010)—Soda’s 75-minute “observational film extra” (per its opening title card) about an aging man and woman who spend their modest means caring for the elderly or disabled— catalogues the male protagonist’s many adopted strays in a volley of quick, direct portraits. Indeed, cats constantly prowl around the edges of the seven observational films the director has made since 2007, whether slinking into the outskirts of a psychiatric clinic (Mental, 2008), standing guard outside the home base of a wellknown Tokyo acting company (Theater 1 and Theater 2, 2012), or lingering at the edge of a dock as commercial fishing ships come in from the sea…

“In so far as the development [of fear] is still incipient, and is restricted to a mere signal, the more undisturbed the conversion of the readiness to be afraid into action the more purposeful the entire proceeding.” —Sigmund Freud For a filmmaker whose work is predicated on a mode of restless ambiguity, it is telling that the title of Benjamin Naishtat’s 2014 breakout film Historia del miedo translates as both a history, and story, of fear. Naishtat’s work to date has staked out the historical legacy of his native Argentina’s 19th-century frontier conquest (via dictatorial and genocidal campaigns) while limning less conspicuous, modern-day portraits of fear incarnate. That the dual points— historical record and speculative narrative, the past and the present— are tacitly related would appear to be Naishtat’s abiding…

The film shows an old-fashioned train pulling into a station diagonally from the top right corner of the screen. People get on and off the train, walk off the platform and off-screen—in 3D. Without having consulted the notes for this program—a highly varied selection of 3D shorts screening as part of the 61st Oberhausen Short Film Festival’s theme series “The Third Image: 3D as Experiment,” curated by Bjorn Speidel—I wondered what I was seeing. Was it the Lumieres’ original L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), made stereoscopic through digital technology? No, this was different: the people are wearing clothes from a different period; they come into the frame and look directly at the camera as they walk past. Was it then a remake of the Lumieres’ film?…

“It is in a house that one is alone. Not outside of it, but inside. In the park there are birds, cats. Maybe even a squirrel, a ferret. We are not alone in a park. But in the house, we are so alone that we are sometimes lost.” —Marguerite Duras, Écrire Writing about writing also meant writing about solitude for Marguerite Duras. Sequestered in her house in Neauphle-le-Chateau in north-central France, the French writer-filmmaker wrote many of her many books there while grappling with loneliness to extricate the torrent of emotion and memories she carried within her. Hunger, emotional exhaustion, pain—these emotions were real as the authorial routine (i.e., the structural, pathological discipline) took over so many years of her life. “To write,” she said, “is also not to speak.…

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” That, friends, is an opening sentence: J.G. Ballard at his best. And damn if Ben Wheatley doesn’t find just the right visual syntax to convey that tone of sanguine urbanity, spiced with a soupcon of barbarism. Man bites dog! It is time for High-Rise at last. Published in 1975 (the same year, incidentally, that David Cronenberg infected a condo with sexual slugs in Shivers), the novel is a kind of adult Lord of the Flies, with a luxury tower block—all mod cons—replacing William Golding’s shipwreck island, and instead of the kids there’s a cross-section of mid-’70s swingers, lefties,…

If synergy between maker and subject is some sort of auteurist benchmark, then Noah Baumbach might have reached his apex with Greenberg (2010), his Ben Stiller-starring drama about a curmudgeonly fortysomething who spends his days mulling over his stalled musical career and writing snotty letters to faceless corporate entities like Starbucks. Greenberg is the director’s clearest articulation of the sour-tinged-with-sweetness worldview (an outlook which owes more to Jim Davis’ Garfield than to Baumbach’s oft name-dropped personal hero Eric Rohmer) that is taken to its caustic limits in The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Margot at the Wedding (2007). But it also serves as a tidy transitional point for Baumbach’s career in its backdoor smuggling-in of Greta Gerwig as the film’s co-lead and collaborator. It’s probably facile to liken Gerwig’s…