Innehållsförteckning för Issue 67 - Summer 2016 från Cinema Scope

And so goes the decade, and perhaps all of humanity as we know it—it was fun while it lasted. As a supplement to the Top Ten lists printed here, which semi-scientifically summarize the privately expressed preferences of our regular contributors, I decided to do something a little different to glance back at the past ten years. By the time of publication you can find numerous examples of excellent writing on all of the films in our decade-end list, both in previous issues of Cinema Scope and also in other publications, in print and online, on the occasion of revisiting the past ten bountiful years in cinema. So I came up with the benignly nationalistic idea of focusing on what transpired in Canadian cinema over the past decade, but with a…

The rigorous and vibrant visual rhythms of Jodie Mack’s cinema were first impressed upon me in 2009, when I premiered a short film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in a section titled “Feminist Travelogues.” I was fortunate to have been programmed alongside Jodie, who was screening a 28-minute stop-motion animation musical epic titled Yard Work Is Hard Work (2008). During the screening I sat completely dazzled as I watched an intimidating wall of meticulously cut images pulled from catalogues perform intricate designs, which, in combination with acrobatic camera movements and an original soundtrack, told an allegorical story of the disillusionment of married life. I was overcome by the film: I found that it was suffused with an aura of isolation and defeat; it was impressively impenetrable. During our Q&A…

I first encountered Sergei Loznitsa’s work at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. Though I was busy watching student films and shorts as president of the Cinefondation jury, I found some time to steal away and watch some other work in the Official Selection. Loznitsa’s feature My Joy was in Competition. Watching this film changed something about what my sense of cinema could be. It presented itself as a realist film about a trucker named Georgy, but something shifts in his journey when he picks up a child prostitute along the way. Traffic comes to a stop on the highway, so she suggests an alternate route. After stopping at a village along this rough road, the child prostitute starts to scream at Georgy for his hypocritical sense of charity and…

As a child, Steven Spielberg would contemplate the static on the TV. One can imagine that in the black-and-white squares one can see something like all the possibilities that may exist, like how X-rays have shown that the black square in Malevich’s Black Square on White Background in fact covers coloured objects. Molly Haskell writes that Spielberg arrives in the history of movies at a point where the myth of an inclusive middle class, and a homogeneous America, was beginning to break down. And yet he was to “re-invigorate the fantasy, making films for an ‘everyone’ that we were told no longer existed.” But what if this “everyone” never existed as given and had to be constructed? “Everyone” is an axiom to pursue, rather than a reality that already exists.…

Lost Book Found (1996), Instrument (1999), and Benjamin Smoke (2000), the first of Jem Cohen’s films that I encountered, were all made between the years 1996 and 2000—the apex of the anti-globalization movement, the early (more idealistic) dawn of the internet era, the last years of my teens. I was perhaps primed to be Cohen’s audience: my world was a post-punk music scene steeped in DIY aesthetics and anti-capitalist longings. I first saw Jem’s images projected behind the Montreal ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor in a dilapidated theatre during a $5 sit-down show and was bewitched. These were the films that taught me that what we call documentary can be musical, poetic, strange, and tender, and that feeling, however inchoate, could also be part of the record. But two decades…

Forty years after it made its debut at the Venice Biennale’s Austrian pavilion, Valie Export’s sculpture Gerburtenbett (“The Birth Bed”) now stands in London, where the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has recreated the artist’s original 1980 installation. The foundation of the piece is a large, metal-plated wedge bisected by a horizontal panel to form a platform, whose proportions and weight call to mind a mortuary slab. From this surface emerge two mannequin-like legs attached to a female pelvis, between which are two striplights of glowing, blood-red neon. The figure’s head, sunken into null space, has been replaced by a television set, on which screens a continuous loop of a priest issuing the rite of communion, accompanied by a sustained drone. There is no baby, and perhaps there never was; the equation…

On “A Melody Composed by Chance…”—an excellent new audiovisual analysis of Jacques Demy’s Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) on the BFI’s Blu-ray of the film, written and narrated by Geoff Andrew and deftly edited by this disc’s producer Upekha Bandaranayake—I’m grateful to Andrew for correcting the gaffe in my booklet essay claiming that the film’s offscreen ax-murder victim is the Lola (Anouk Aimée) of Demy’s first feature, who subsequently turns up in Model Shop (1969); in fact, it’s the much older Lola Lola of The Blue Angel (1930), Josef von Sternberg’s first Marlene Dietrich feature. The other notable extras on this release include “feature-length” audio interviews with Demy (by Don Allen), Michel Legrand (by David Meeker), and Gene Kelly (by John Russell Taylor), Agnès Varda’s essential documentary Les demoiselles ont…

1. I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec) 2. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa) 3. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcelo) 4. Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie) 5. Liberté (Albert Serra) 6. Heimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise) 7. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho) 8. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino) 9. Synonyms (Nadav Lapid) 10. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese) Special Mentions: Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Frank Beauvais); Present.Perfect. (Zhu Shengze); State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa); The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio); Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)…

Like many of Kim Deitch’s sprawling, rambunctious graphic novels, his latest spans the long first century of cinema. Reincarnation Stories begins with an elderly D.W. Griffith, tight on whiskey in ’40s L.A. and lamenting for Hollywood’s “yesterday,” and ends with a feline YouTube phenom starring in a Tom Cruise blockbuster. Deitch’s books often repeat this pattern, leaping back and forth from the beginnings of cinema—Mélièsian “attractions” of the 1900s, adventure serials of the 1910s, silent Westerns, early sound cartoons—to our transmedia present, when these once-vital arts languish forgotten by all but a few devotees and lunatics. The artist’s interests in neglected popular art are broad—he digs into the background of everything from bottle-cap art to kids’ TV hosts to Jazz Age stuffed toys—but his movie madness is always central to…

There is a scene early in Corneliu Porumboiu’s When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013) in which the main character, a film director named Paul, sits in his bare kitchen, smoking a cigarette, caught in his thoughts. He seems slightly bothered, although like most Porumboiu leads his facial expression remains largely inscrutable throughout the film, only occasionally varying between neutral and mildly annoyed. After a moment, he takes a fork and presses it against his stomach, bending it to the point that he emits a muffled groan. He then picks up his phone and calls his producer to tell her that his condition has worsened: he fears his ulcer has returned, and she may have to delay the shoot (“It feels like a knife in the stomach”). Beyond the…

What would Harry Lime say about today? It feels like the time of the Borgias, but without the Renaissance. Oppression, trauma, and war are omnipresent—and that’s just on my list of the decade’s top films, which includes reflections on the scars left by conflicts past (Christian Petzold’s Transit, 2018; Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises, 2013; Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, 2017), portraits of traumatized soldiers (Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War, 2014; Valeska Grisebach’s Western, 2017; Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, 2012), and works that bear witness to atrocities (Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, 2019; Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, 2012, and The Look of Silence, 2014). Even a film that didn’t lose its sense of humour amidst the madness—Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s sly…

I’ve lost count, but I think I’ve seen Angela Schanelec’s The Dreamed Path (2016) probably half a dozen times since first watching it at TIFF in 2016. I saw it twice in that same week at the festival, as after the first viewing I immediately knew I had to see it again. Perhaps I initially wanted to rewatch it to solve it, to put the puzzle together and make sure I understood it. Or maybe I just wanted to confirm that it was real—that The Dreamed Path wasn’t just a dream. To me, it was immediately clear that it was a masterpiece, which is a term I seldom use. I also find best-of-the-decade lists frustrating; I don’t think I could contribute a best-of-the-decade or best-of-the-year list. But I know that…

“Canadian history—or, how to wage war on an emotion. For a century, no one spoke of the extinction of joy. A village emptied of its children is a haunting.” —Billy-Ray Belcourt, from “A Country is How Men Hunt” There’s a reason why my father never spoke of his time at a Sámi boarding school in Unjárga (Nesseby), Norway. His memories from that time were rooted in a type of pain that was immense and unyielding. His survival mechanism was to forcefully contain those memories somewhere impossibly deep inside. Growing up, my father refused to speak the “imperialist language” at home, which is why Sámi is my first language; I am a citizen of Norway who cannot speak Norwegian. We spent the first part of my childhood in Kárášjohka, a Sámi…

1. Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch) 2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) 3. Zama (Lucrecia Martel) 4. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) 5. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) 6. L’Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) (Bertrand Bonello) 7. Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard) 8. Horse Money (Pedro Costa) 9. Tabu (Miguel Gomes) 10. Phoenix (Christian Petzold) Special Mentions: The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien); Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami); Holy Motors (Leos Carax); L’inconnu du lac (Alain Guiraudie); Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)…

I initially wanted this piece to be about a writer—after all, are not images and words inseparable, delicately intertwined?—but I was gently nudged to stay focused on the image side of things. The task itself seemed like an impossible process of elimination, however, one that was finally alleviated only when I recalled the opening quotation published in this magazine in the article about my film Fausto (2018): “Most people want to be kings and queens, but not enough want to be Faust.”—Jean-Luc Godard Godard and Borges. Image and Language. Faust. But not the rogue man who ate lavish meals, drank copious amounts of wine, hoarded bags of gold, fed off mischief, took trips on a magic coat, and got lost in labyrinths. No, not that Faust. That would be the…

Whatta freak. If you haven’t seen Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show, here’s how it works: Zahedi narrates a documentary about him trying to make a TV series. Every episode of the show is about him making the previous episode of the show, with the pilot being about him pitching the show to a Brooklyn TV station. Everything he goes through is recreated by real people (his wife plays his wife, his students are his students, etc.), and the lines are all written by him, based on his memory of how the events actually happened (“I didn’t say that” could be the show’s catchphrase). It’s Caveh Zahedi making a meta-autodocumentary about Caveh Zahedi, kinda like Symbiopsychoblahblahblah meets Synecdoche, New York (2008), or Allan King’s A Married Couple (1969) if…

“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea Even if her films are quite different from my work both thematically and stylistically, Lucrecia Martel has been a constant source of inspiration for me, particularly her tactile, personal, and uncompromising approach to cinema, and the way she invites us to rethink reality. She is not interested in asserting a pre-established order or creating a chain of narrative causes and consequences that we can follow clearly to a satisfactory conclusion: instead, she masterfully uses cinematic language to constantly make us doubt everything we see and hear, forcing us to inhabit a state of permanent uncertainty. I first watched Martel’s Salta Trilogy in 2009, at which time…

Fourteen years ago, two members of the US Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, released a comprehensive study on the effects of low-fidelity video on human psychomotor performance, behaviour, and subjective perception. As robotic technologies become increasingly common in the fields of space exploration, search and rescue missions, national defense, health care, and, of course, the entertainment industry, the lab’s investigation set out to determine—on behalf of the American military’s so-called Future Combat System—the deficiency threshold for live video feeds to be streamed in from the battlefield, where unmanned assets, vehicles, and systems are to be operated by soldiers controlling them remotely, out of harm’s way. However, potential obstacles such as bandwidth volatility, electronic jamming, and dynamic network distances pose challenges to streaming video and therefore also to…