Innehållsförteckning för Issue 69 - Winter 2017 från Cinema Scope

I stopped looking at video footage of September 11, 2001, a long time ago as I find these moving images of expressionistically variable quality and cubist perspective anguished, frightful, and daunting. Two years after the attack, I moved to New York City, and over time I became a part of the city—or it became a part of me—but I always remained a person who joined it after a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual rift that had been made between its people and in its topography. It is a gap of experience over which I can never really reach in feeling or comprehension. My wife, who was in Lower Manhattan when the two planes hit the Twin Towers, still gets flustered and upset when that day comes up in conversation, as…

Salomé Lamas’ experimental feature Eldorado XXI is a film that we might call a “modified ethnography,” in the sense that Lamas has gone to a particular location—La Rinconada y Cerro Lunar settlement in the Peruvian Andes—to observe both the landscape and those individuals who populate it. But as with a number of similarly minded films in recent years, the ethnographic “subjects” are understood to be heavily involved in the versions of themselves they choose to expose to Lamas and, by extension, the film’s viewership. Lamas herself refers to Eldorado XXI as a “critical media practice para-fiction attempt,” and while that string of verbiage may seem like a great deal of poststructuralist throat-clearing, her tentative genre designation is well worth considering. We can understand her claims much better, of course, by…

How in the world did Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau (Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves) win the Best Canadian Feature prize this year at TIFF? I’m wondering this not because I think the film is unworthy, or necessarily less impressive than a number of other notable 2016 Canadian premieres. Rather, my surprise is connected to a jury of industry professionals (two producers, a director, and a critic) throwing their support (and $30,000 CAD) to a truly gruelling, designedly brutalizing, three-hour immersion in Québécois radical politics—a marathon featuring numerous (staged) scenes of violent self-harm interspersed amidst grainy documentary footage of student protests, anguished, didactic voiceovers, scads of full-frontal nudity, and pounding waves of ALL CAPS epigrams plastered…

From the start of Gastón Solnicki’s Kékszakállú it seems like a boy’s boy’s boy’s world. In the opening moments three boys bound off a high diving board, followed by a girl whose hesitation is so prolonged the scene ends before we learn whether she follows suit or opts for retreat. We see boys fully focused on waxing their surfboards, while an arrestingly pretty doeeyed girl simply looks on. An impossibly buff boy, wearing only shorts, does expert push-ups in a field. Several brisk scenes later the same buff boy—or perhaps it’s a different buff boy; they’re somewhat interchangeable—tends a garden. Boys know how to do stuff in Kékszakállú—except sissy stuff like insert shirt buttons into their corresponding holes. Thing is, they’re boring. Solnicki just wants to be with the girls,…

“Le Grand Balcon” is the name of the brothel in Jean Genet’s 1957 play Le Balcon, where it serves as a “house of illusions” (as one of the characters calls it) rather than simply a house of pleasure or tolerance. It is also the title of this year’s La Biennale de Montréal (BNLMTL), curated by Belgian-born, Frankfurt-based Philippe Pirotte, whose curatorial statement gave a broad nod toward Genet’s radical theatrics, sensual forms, and transgressive politics. It was a grand mélange with a fair number of impressive works, many shown at the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC), eliciting both contrasts and ricochets amid highlights and lowlights, which ultimately and rather intelligently served up an unexpected dose of institutional critique. There were metagestures in themes and the usual relational, situational aesthetics of placement,…

“This film tells the story of a boy who turned into a bird.” Portending something fantastic, these are the first words spoken in Tales of Two Who Dreamt, a cagey new feature co-directed by Andrea Bussmann and Nicolás Pereda. Set in an anonymous, rundown apartment complex on the margins of Toronto, this small-scale portrait of an asylum-seeking community shot on black-and-white digital video is a contemporary work in the truest sense. Emblematic of a postmillennial trend in independent cinema that freely combines elements of narrative and nonfiction storytelling, the film unfolds in a highly reflexive manner, as if in a state of constant regeneration as its main characters, a family of Hungarian Roma immigrants, tell and discuss stories from a script written for a forthcoming film. Bussmann and Pereda at…

In the wake of the Arab Spring, Maki Berchache, a young Tunisian man who had formerly worked at a hotel that catered to French tourists, crossed the Mediterranean via Lampedusa, landed in Italy, and trekked cross-country to Paris. Upon his arrival, he reached out to former guests of the hotel who had told him to get in touch should he ever be in the French capital, and was shocked by the way they evaded and shunned him now that he was no longer a pleasant and pliant server, but a “problem” on their doorstep. Soon after his arrival, Berchache befriended French filmmaker and activist Nathalie Nambot through their mutual work at a labour rights co-op which provides shelter and support to the homeless, including scores of North African migrants. As…

I moved to the United States on October 22, 2000, to work as an IT consultant in New York City just a few days before the infamous presidential election that saw George W. Bush lose the popular vote and ultimately “defeat” Al Gore, after the conservative Supreme Court controversially halted the Florida recounts. Then the harsh winter came, and it made me wonder why the hell I had left Spain, where I had been living happily since 1994. A handful of months later, two planes brought down the World Trade Center. My client, a company called eSpeed, had its office in one of the towers. With my client’s demise, I lost my job shortly thereafter, on September 19, 2001. I became a “victim of 9/11” and got compensated by the…

There is certainly no dearth of films derived from the work of Nobel Prize-winning authors, and there are even some notable instances of the authors doing that transposing themselves, from George Bernard Shaw with Pygmalion (1938) to Imre Kertész with Fateless (2005). (The notoriously Nobel-snubbed Nabokov would have joined this company with his screenplay for Kubrick’s Lolita [1962].) Rarer by far, however, are those laureates who have created works directly for the screen, a particularly distinguished list that includes Kawabata Yasunari (A Page of Madness, 1926), Samuel Beckett (Film, 1963), Patrick Modiano (Lacombe, Lucien, 1974)—and, now, Bob Dylan, newly and controversially feted by the Swedish Academy. Unlike his fellows on that list, of course, Dylan is not (primarily) a novelist or playwright but a songwriter, and as a filmmaker—well, as…

Alanis Obomsawin isn’t here for cinephilia. The legendary 84-year-old activist-documentarian’s We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice is an object lesson in no-BS nonfiction filmmaking, a work of sweeping compassion and sustained outrage culled from over 300 hours of footage shot by Obomsawin and her crew over the course of a nine-year civil lawsuit. We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice tracks a campaign led against the Canadian government by civil-rights activist Cindy Blackstock, refusing to leave its courtroom setting in search of broader context for its audience, letting it instead emerge organically from testimonies against the state delivered by First Nations Canadians. (For this, it occupies a formal mode that verges on both oratory and claustrophobia, near-opposite the ever-slickening genre of popular “impact docs.”) Officially filed by the Assembly…

If poetry after Auschwitz constituted an act of barbarism, then what can be made of curious tourists eating sandwiches, or snapping self-portraits, on the lawns of former concentration camps now repurposed as museums? The question isn’t so much posed as interrogatively embedded in Austerlitz’s conceptual framework, in which “dark tourism” is subjected to a formally distanced yet skeptical gaze of its own, by way of a camera that is, to all appearances, indistinguishable from—and yet purely oppositional to—the ubiquitous memory tool of choice brandished by the idling hordes. Premised on the paradox of fleeting vigilance and historical sampling, Austerlitz extends from Sergei Loznitsa’s own visit to Buchenwald, where a source of unease arose from proximity to the living rather than the dead. If memorializing the Holocaust feels born of an…

Greed, along with money, makes the world go round. Generosity, in all its forms, is an unprofitable attribute—the sooner in life you get rid of it, the better off you’ll be. This is one of the many lessons Donald Treebeck (Kris Avedisian) doesn’t seem to have learned in spite of his not-sotender age. A guileless child trapped in the body of a thirtysomething, Donald reunites with his old friend Peter Latang (Jesse Wakeman), who’s returned to their small Rhode Island town after a long absence because of his grandmother’s death. Their very meeting is actually occasioned by a financial dilemma, with Peter losing his wallet on the way from the airport, thus having to knock on his old friend’s door to ask for help. While the sharply dressed Peter can’t…

Searching society’s margins for cultural lifeblood is a timeworn trait of nonfiction cinema. With Rat Film, director Theo Anthony goes one step further, looking to the gutters of Baltimore, Maryland, for evidence of the city’s muted pulse. Aptly premiering in Locarno’s Signs of Life program, Anthony’s debut feature takes as its nominal subject Baltimore’s most pervasive pest, the Norway rat, and looks backward into history and forward into the future to paint a holistic portrait of a blighted culture whose marginalized populace has been reduced in the eyes of those in authority to an untoward burden, not unlike their storied vermin infestation. (Anthony is quick to point out Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City, among other books of sociological relevance, as a key textual touchstone.) Anthony has parlayed such…

In In the Line of Fire (1993), John Malkovich’s crack-shot-slash-crackpot gets off a wickedly funny line about JFK, gloating that the 35th Commander-in-Chief’s favourite poem was Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” which, he adds, “is not a good poem.” It’s a bad-taste joke touching on the verboten notion that one of the 20th century’s most famous faces had bad taste, designed to get the goat of the “New Frontier generation” (embodied in the film by no less than Clint Eastwood) and those who’ve grown up in its shadow. If this would-be presidential assassin were truly ruthless, though, he’d add that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Camelot—an even more famous Kennedy family favourite—is not a good musical. Or, in the words of Noël Coward, who attended its…

“Foghat haircut,” the critic scribbled. Onscreen, Gary Beydler (1944-2010), one of the greatest American experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, is seated atop what might be a tall white lifeguard’s chair, sporting jet-black aviator shades beneath a fluffy fringe of ’70s rocker locks. He holds a rectangular mirror, proportions roughly Academy ratio, propped up on his thighs, his hands at either edge. The camera filming the filmmaker is too low to depict the eastern horizon line behind Beydler, only pure blue sky filled with wisps, then billows of clouds. Reflected in the mirror in Beydler’s hands is the western horizon opposite the filmmaker, across the lapping waves of the Pacific. Clouds assemble behind the filmmaker; waves, reflected in the mirror, flood and ebb in front of him. The film is…

Sieranevada marks the deserved upgrade of Romanian director Cristi Puiu to Cannes Competition status after two prior Un Certain Regard entries. The 2005 sidebar win of his second feature The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which follows an old, unpleasant alcoholic’s last long journey through the night (and various overcrowded Romanian hospitals), had announced the breakthrough of what was soon to be called the Romanian New Wave. His 2010 follow-up Aurora, starring Puiu himself as the protagonist of a serial-killer story turned inside out with an existentialist twist, confirmed the director as the movement’s major figure, most skilfully combining the completely convincing realistic textures of rigorous vérité-style (many scenes seem to play out in real time) with a pronounced interest in philosophical inquiry that stretches way beyond the surface story to…

It was a reminder of how much we desperately need stories and storytelling to make sense of the world when I saw one guy punch another guy in the face one evening on the UCLA campus in 1977. The guy getting punched had become all agitated arguing for his favourite book at the time—the fiction anthology Anti-Story—and claiming that we had all entered a new era where stories were dead. The punch to the face ended that discussion, but said something else: claiming that we’ve moved past stories is like claiming we’re past oxygen. Biologists know that we’re hard-wired for stories. Just as we visually perceive the world as we do because of the shape and position of our eyes, so we biologically require stories, and each is a result…

It’s typical of Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature that the inspiration for its Thai title flashes past in an instant, a single fleeting image tucked away amid a stream of others. Nothing out of the ordinary is shown, just a shot out from a car on the Bangkok highway that catches a glimpse of the sign for the exit to Dao Khanong, a nondescript neighbourhood on the city’s outskirts. We neither see whether the car takes the exit nor where the exit might lead, but that’s not the point. As in the film as a whole, the emphasis is on what’s seen along the way rather than the ultimate destination, on the tension between centre and periphery, on being free to leave the path at any time. The English title evokes…

Explaining the genesis of Free Fire, Ben Wheatley declared that it arose from his desire, after the high-profile, high-stakes High-Rise (2015), to “make the kind of film I wanted to watch, one which is funny and where heads get cracked.” One frequently senses in Wheatley’s public pronouncements a reluctance to completely embrace the lofty auteur status that has been thrust upon him since his breakout Kill List (2011), even as he laps up the opportunities and indulges the artistic freedom that his burgeoning status affords him. If Free Fire does ultimately live up (or down) to its director’s advance mea culpa, it also perhaps hints at a solution to the growing conundrum of Wheatley’s particular position in contemporary cinema. Simultaneously frustrating and fascinating, boring and beguiling, Free Fire leads one…

A young man shifts uncomfortably in his seat, peering over at the girl sitting across from him. Both sit on high-backed chairs in an old drawing room; there are three other people of a similar age there with them. Each is as restless in his or her seat as the next. They are all in suits or smart dresses, glancing around as if struggling to break through the soundless pocket of spare time in which they find themselves. The coiffed young man, still fidgeting, takes a drag from his cigarette and glances down, struggling to suppress a smirk as he catches the eye of one of the other people waiting to see the dentist. The young man is played by Jean-Luc Godard. At 20 years old, he is also the…

In retrospect, it seems one of the oddest detours a popular entertainment medium in the postwar era could have taken: the spontaneous creation of a grindhouse subgenre not predicated on nudity or vice or transgressive narrative subject or even, really, traditional movie action, but rather on the semi-realistic depiction of human mutilation and simple bloodletting. The seductiveness of “gore” as a brand of spectacle can be elusive, to say the least; we may as successfully ask why some people like the taste of vodka or enjoy being flogged. You watch Herschell Gordon Lewis’ movies today, from 1963’s Blood Feast onward, and you cannot help but wonder, “Really, this entertained somebody?” Did it? It couldn’t have been just giggling teenage boys daring each other to endure the grossness, could it? (“Can…

“People only die of love in movies,” claims Anne Vernon’s petit-bourgeois pedant to her lovesick daughter (Catherine Deneuve) in Jacques Demy’s Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), that misguided Valentine’s Day rephouse staple whose candy-coloured palette is knowingly at odds with its dishearteningly realistic appraisal of true love’s chances in this world. In Cherbourg and its follow-up Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), Demy was able to both recapture the joyful artifice and euphoric emotion of his beloved MGM musicals whilst complicating (if not completely contravening) their happy Hollywood endings, satisfying audience love of sugar and sentiment even as he stocked his stories with the grim realities of unwanted pregnancies, war, murder, and tragically missed connections. With its Skittles-candy palette and upbeat, jazz-infused score, La La Land— Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to the…