Innehållsförteckning för Issue 68 - Fall 2016 från Cinema Scope

From the bottom of the sea, across a city, and into the stratosphere; from the moon, through a deserted city, deep into the forest, and down into a hole in the Earth. Argentinian director Eduardo Williams' recent short films— Could See a Puma (2011) and I forgot! (2014)— follow strange trajectories both over and through landscapes. With his newest film and first feature, The Human Surge, winner of the main prize in Locarno's Filmmakers of the Present competition, he takes us from a dark domestic space in a flooded city across three continents, through the networked tunnels of an ant-hill, before emerging, finally, in the fluorescent glare of a lab for inspecting tablet computers. Williams' cinema is one of vectors: across borders, networks, and states of being. These routes are…

Cinema is synonymous with longing. Projections of desire, fleeting moments of past experience replayed, forbidden fantasy, formal beauty smouldering or abstract—there are countless ways in which film is imbued with, but also transmits, expressions of longing. Its singular relationship to time allows cinema to bridge great distances, to spur on existential enquiry, to transcend reality and proffer alternate modes of existence but also, as clichéd or as glib as it may sound, to alter or affect the ways in which we see and feel the world around us. One of the year's dreamiest films is also one of the most elegantly and ingeniously realized films on longing: Ruth Beckermann's The Dreamed Ones. Revisiting and resuscitating the deeply complex, longtime clandestine correspondence between the two great postwar German language poets, Ingeborg…

They once had a shootin' up in the Klondike When they got Dan McGrew Folks were putting the blame on The lady known as Lou That's the story that went around But here's the real low-down Put the blame on Mame, boys Put the blame on Mame Mame did a dance called the hoochy-coo That's the thing that slew McGrew So you can put the blame on Mame, boys Put the blame on Mame "Put the Blame on Mame," composed by Allen Roberts and Doris Fisher for Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) and performed at a key point in the narrative by Rita Hayworth's eponymous, too-hotto-handle femme fatale, attributes three cataclysmic events—the Chicago fire of 1871, the 1886 Manhattan blizzard, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—to a single seductress intent on…

In his 1995 interview with Scott MacDonald published in A Critical Cinema 3, Peter Hutton made a general assessment about his films, one that has been quoted quite a bit in the weeks since the filmmaker's death. Let's take a moment and consider it: "I've never felt that my films are very important in terms of the History of Cinema. They offer a little detour from such grand concepts. They appeal primarily to people who enjoy looking at nature, or who enjoy having a moment to study something that's not fraught with information. The experience of my films is a little like daydreaming." In another interview with MacDonald, conducted in 2007 (published in MacDonald's collection Adventures in Perception), he and Hutton discuss the non-narrative film work of Abbas Kiarostami, in…

With its boldly stylized design, looking otherworldly but extracted from the all-too-real, and replete with excess—not least a purring pet cheetah lounging on ornate carpet and riding in a luxury sports car, and a brotherhood of Muslim bikers astride sparkling choppers— The Challenge could double as a wayward film-festival advert. Yuri Ancarani's Filmmakers of the Present Special Jury Prize winner is embalmed in a garish yellow colour scheme, not unlike Locarno itself come festival time. The garish artifice evinced by the film's production stills owe more to its chosen milieu than its mise en scène, a compositionally stark, visually expansive rendering of an ancient treatise, De Arte Venandifficum Avibus (On the Art of Hunting with Birds), manifest in the modern Arab world. The gloss of the Festival del film Locarno…

A decade after her youthful debut Tout est pardonné(2007), the now-35-year-old Mia Hansen-Løve has become a veteran. But she's always been an old soul. Her films are rife with scenes of teenagers being forced to confront hypocrisy and loss well ahead of schedule, and she's very good at capturing the split-seconds where cleanly diagrammed idealism either comes up short or melts away into the rearview mirror—partings of such sweet sorrow. The title of Un amour de jeunesse (2011) thus resonates as a kind of artistic mission statement, although it gets refined and reframed in L'avenir, which has a very different—and more distanced—relationship to nostalgia. In her fifth feature, Hansen-Løve obliges herself for the first time to gaze forward even as her sexagenarian main character is compelled to look back, in…

In Elle, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) slaps her adult son in the face, sleeps with a hammer under her pillow, deliberately smashes into her ex-husband's car and later pepper-sprays him, accidentally crashes her own car, buys a gun, and forces a much younger male employee at her video-game company to show her his penis as a penalty for insubordination—and that's only a partial inventory of the ways in which she acts out over the course of the film. It's unclear whether Michèle's relentlessly aggressive behaviour is in response to her having been sexually assaulted in her home by a masked assailant in the very first scene of the film, or the result of psychic wires that got crossed a long time ago; the key is that Paul Verhoeven doesn't ask us…

Gaining Ground, a series presented at the 2016 Melbourne International Film Festival, comprised six films that were directed by women and that were filmed entirely or partly in New York City during the '70s and '80s. The festival literature billed the films as "defiant declarations of independence" that "changed independent cinema forever," but if it's hard to watch these movies today without being reminded of how much American independent cinema has changed since they were made, it's doubtful whether these particular films, innovative and admirable as they are, had much to do with the changes. Each of the six films—Elaine May's A New Leaf (1971; not an independent film, but OK), Claudia Weill's Girlfriends (1978), Susan Seidelman's Smithereens (1982), Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground (1982), Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983),…

In the twilight of Elizabeth I's reign, when many of the plays of a novice William Shakespeare bore the names of the Virgin Queen's royal predecessors, the theatre was divided into two distinct but not wholly autonomous spheres: the public playhouse, huge openair amphitheatres that accommodated any groundling willing to shell out a pence for a staging of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Lyly, or Kyd; and privately owned indoor theatres, where limited seating pushed the price of entry up to attract the patronage of a much wealthier clientele. Despite this bifurcation, the same plays were performed in both spaces, and actors' companies depended on aristocratic or royal benefactors to protect them from laws against vagabondage. This carnivalesque yoking of lowly troupes of players and playwrights with the crème of the courts marked…

Near the end of his life, Abbas Kiarostami decided to make a film about the birth of cinema in order to say something about its future. One of his last films was a one-minute and 25-second long short made as part of Future Reloaded, a project from the Venice Film Festival conceived in 2013 tofficelebrate its 70th anniversary. Kiarostami decided to remake Auguste and Louis Lumière's L'arroseur arrosé (1895), sometimes considered to be the first cinematic comedy. Kiarostami copied almost literally the Lumières' one shot, although there are some technical improvements that summarize the evolution of the media: basically montage, sound, and colour, but also the use of the digital camera. In separate shots, we see a small camera on a tripod and a little boy behind it, first laughing…

Some of the most interesting films at this year's Festival del film Locarno tended to be those where fiction and documentary weren't so much as coming together as falling apart. Call it productive decay: as the seams and edges of these works started to show, you could see the emergence of something that was not just new, but also uncanny in its familiarity. That's certainly the case with Dane Komljen's debut All the Cities of the North, which begins as a kind of study of two figures in a landscape, although here the landscape is a distinctly modernist Yugoslavian group of abandoned concrete buildings. At one level there is a cryptic, tender love story unfolding, one that is as notable for softly-lit shots across the bodies of sleeping men (with…

To waste no time: Bertrand Bonello's Nocturamahas nothing to say about either Nick Cave or the Bad Seeds, and, more crucially, is not a film about terrorism. Perhaps a strange assertion, the latter, given that the movie spends all 130 of its sublime, stomach-churning minutes in the company of a crew of young men and women who are in the process of executing a meticulously coordinated bomb attack on Paris. But here, as in Julia Loktev's Day Night, Day Night (2006) and Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves (2013)—two other semi-recent arthouse films that showedterrorism but were ultimately more concerned with matters pertaining to the psychology of paranoia, the fundamental complexity of morality, and the aura of their respective landscapes—ideology as a question or line of enquiry is provocatively mitigated…

It arrives as both throwaway moment and photo-historical anachronism: dozens are adorned in white on a sand dune, whiling away the hours before dusk; a girl is passed a 19th-century stereopticon, brings it to her eyes, and sees images in motion—glimpses of a city on "the mainland," an urban environment of horse-drawn carriages and mustachioed street salesmen. Theirs are the only white faces to appear in Julie Dash's ensemble psychodrama Daughters of the Dust, which centres on the women of the early-20th century Peazant family, Gullah people based in South Carolina's Sea Islands, descendants of "saltwater Africans" believed to have been captured from West Africa. The film sees the clan assemble for a celebration on the eve of a northward migration, but the moment's optimism finds itself tested by Nana…

"The everyday is platitude (what lags and falls back, the residual life with which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled: scrap and refuse); but this banality is also what is most important. It brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived—in the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity." —Maurice Blanchot In his 1959 essay "La parole quotidienne," Maurice Blanchot effectively describes the common experience of existence—that fact of being and living through one's own everyday agenda, one's own distinct condition, however relatively ordinary it may seem with respect to any other's—as essentially always active in light of its fundamental indeterminacy. To participate with and experience the world, as we automatically and necessarily do as long as…

With its reputation as an all but unbroken flatland, one tends to forget that Los Angeles is surrounded almost entirely by mountains. Extend outward into the deserts of Greater Los Angeles and the number of mountain ranges on record increases as exponentially as the heat index. Images of Los Angeles, particularly those filmed by Hollywood, may be known for their shape-shifting ability to assume characteristics of other municipalities, but there 's no mistaking the region 's larger topographical thumbprint. That mountains figure prominently in the work of Pat O'Neill, who's been making experimental films in, around, and about Los Angeles for over half a century, should come as no surprise — he remains perhaps the greatest and most prolific chronicler of the American Southwest the city has ever produced. From…

In the funny, lyrical, and hyper-reflexive documentary Further Beyond, the latest work from Irish duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (a.k.a. the Desperate Optimists), two "voiceover artists" named Denise and Allan belie their professional designation by appearing onscreen throughout, recording narration for what seems to be the Optimists' next project—a biopic of Ambrose O'Higgins, a flamboyant, freebooting 18th-century Irish émigré—while occasionally offering their own, somewhat pushy asides to the unseen filmmakers ("Isn't that the music from your last film? You're just using it as a temp track, right?"). Early on, Denise (presumably now reading from her script) observes how all stories inevitably need to "take place somewhere," offering examples—"an interior location, an exterior location, a park, a mall, a leisure centre"—while matching images flash by to accompany the words. A…

Steven Soderbergh's much-ballyhooed departure from feature filmmaking initially came accompanied with word that he'd launch into a work of small-screen historical fiction: a serialized adaptation of The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth's postmodern brick of a novel set in colonial Maryland. Though Soderbergh's Sot-Weed is still forthcoming, the series that has materialized— The Knick, a medical drama set in New York's Knickerbocker hospital at the turn of the last century, where advances in surgery arrive in bloody waves as quickly as the floods of immigrants into Lower Manhattan—echoes the curious contemporaneity of Barth's playful, metafictional satire, if considerably less of its tone. As with Barth, Soderbergh and the show's writers (creators Jack Amiel and Michael Begler and producer Steven Katz) do not impose a modern sensibility on the past so much…

On paper, a biography of French cinema's most elusive off screen presence reads as a wrongheaded exercise, an uphill endeavour seemingly set against the spirit of its subject. As with the recent proliferation of Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971), the release of this biography in English is a moment in which a previously obscured figure—or an object, in the case of Rivette's conspiratorial opus—is drawn into the light. For both, obscurity has always been fused into their existential fabric. "Éric Rohmer" was the invention of a notoriously private literature professor named Maurice Schérer. Behind the filmmaker responsible for some of France's most profitable low-budget films was a fake name, a hidden private life, dates and details of a precinematic life willfully fudged in what little biographical detail was known. In…

If Snowden, director Oliver Stone and screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald's version of the Edward Snowden affair, is remembered for anything, it will be as the first Hollywood movie that turned Barack Obama into a bad guy. Time was, back in the day when Obama walked on water, there was a thing you could call "The Obama-Era entertainment." Danny Glover's President in 2012 (2009), for example, is positively Obama-esque to the core. A decade before Obama, Hollywood had already imagined a black man in the Oval Office with Tommy Lister Jr. in The Fifth Element (1997) and Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact (1998). (The best and funniest is Terry Crews' wild POTUS in Mike Judge's prescient Idiocracy [2006].) Since there can be a cultural lag to our political movements, the new rom-com…

Malcolm Le Grice is speaking there of the Italian Futurism of the early 20th century, as he does extensively throughout the introduction to his 1977 volume Abstract Film and Beyond, one of the key texts on experimental cinema of its era. And though Le Grice— painter, professor, filmmaker, founder of the London Filmmakers Co-operative, and one of the pillars of late '60s/early '70s Structural film—lights on the name Boccioni but once in that intro, he might well have lingered: Umberto Boccioni's fascination with "the dynamic problems of speed, change and fragmentation themselves," specifically as they related to his volumetric analyses of horses galloping in splintered thunder in paintings like The City Rises (1910) and Charge of the Lancers (1915), could well be seen as having laid a framework for Le…