Innehållsförteckning för Issue 84 - Fall 2020 från Cinema Scope

One of the most surprising things about Ulrike Ottinger’s new documentary Paris Calligrammes is how accessible it is. Some cinephiles may be familiar with Ottinger based on an 11-year period of mostly fictional productions that were adjacent to the New German Cinema but, for various reasons, were never entirely subsumed within that rubric. Others are quite possibly more aware of her later work in documentary, in particular her commitment to a radical form of experimental ethnographic cinema. In either case, Ottinger’s films, often difficult to see in the first place, are extremely demanding, in terms of their duration, their bizarre narrative and performance styles, or some combination thereof. However, Ottinger’s new film is a different sort of animal. It’s biography as intellectual history, and although it explains quite a bit…

There’s a point in nearly every Nicolás Pereda film when the narrative is either reoriented or upended in some way. In the past this has occurred through bifurcations in story structure or via ruptures along a given film’s docufiction fault line. Pereda’s ninth feature, Fauna, extends this tradition, though its means of execution and conceptual ramifications represent something new for the 38-year-old Mexican-Canadian filmmaker. Following a decade working at the intersection of fiction and documentary, Pereda has, in recent years, mostly forgone the aesthetics of nonfiction in favour of a unique form of narrative cinema in which real-world issues and anxieties are couched in forms at once grave and fantastical. In the medium-length films Minotaur (2015) and My Skin, Luminous (2019, co-directed by Pereda’s longtime lead actor Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez),…

The interesting case of writer-director Paulo Rocha, whose first two features, The Green Years (1963) and Change of Life (1966), are finally widely available in English-subtitled editions after having been restored over seven years ago thanks to the initiative of Pedro Costa, illustrates that anything like a complete history of cinema—whose actual end date as a theatrical art form may be marked as 2020—is an incomplete project. Even for the most serious of non-Portuguese cinephiles, there’s little working knowledge of Rocha’s body of work. During his 50-year career as a director, his films rarely screened in North America; River of Gold (1998) played at the New York Film Festival, while Change of Life screened posthumously in 2014 at Art of the Real. The only major festival to regularly show his…

The most bizarre, entertaining, subversively hilarious short film I’ve seen in this (so far) abbreviated and straitened cinema year has been Ursonate—a dramatized, 24-minute realization of a semimusical performance of Kurt Schwitters’ notorious, Dadaesque 1922–32 sound poem—which was created by the great experimentally minded contemporary violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (with some help from her friends, as we’ll see below). Ursonate’s premiere took place in May at “Music Never Sleeps,” the livestreamed form of the Dresden Music Festival—a “premiere” that, neither live nor in-person, in a non-space but the real time of a streamed video event, makes a kind of virtual sense for this impossible-topin down hybrid of music, poetry, abstract art, and cinema. The film itself is indeed cinema, not a recorded performance, but just who constitutes the “filmmaker” here is…

If it’s true that Brandon Cronenberg sought to cheekily poke fun at his father David’s needle-phobia in his first film (Antiviral, 2011), it feels like parts of Possessor might have been engineered specifically to make my skin crawl. I would say I have a fairly stern stomach when it comes to horror-movie gore, yet somehow the younger Cronenberg’s new film manages to not only hit my most squeamish of triggers, it luxuriates in them. But the images that stick in Possessor are not of ultraviolence: they’re the surreal, dreamlike eruptions that punctuate its technothriller narrative. Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is an assassin working for an agency that deals in technologically advanced corporate espionage. She carries out her assignments by temporarily taking over the mind and body of someone close to…

“There is a boy across the river Whose cheeks are like peaches Alas, I cannot swim”–Sappho 600 BC As I type this, it’s 2:00pm in northeast Los Angeles, middle of the afternoon: the sky is brown with smoke, air conditioners are walking off the job, and last night I could barely breathe. Yesterday, it was 113 degrees in parts of northeast LA; the mountains and forests around us are on fire. “Just another day in paradise,” as the most seasoned Angelenos have become all too accustomed to gritting their smiles and facetiously confessing. I wish I could say I was used to it. My last two columns were written under similar and now much-too-familiar frightmares: first, the nationwide shutdown at the beginning of the pandemic and the prospect of cascading…

“The night scares me so much,” confesses a courageous Yazidi pre-teen girl to a therapist, remembering the period when she and her younger sister were captured by ISIS. Anyone who was seen crying would be killed, they were told; it turned out to be a vacant threat, but the sisters were still beaten, and now they are attempting to exorcise their memories by drawing pictures of them. Does it help? We never find out. The night continues to haunt her, but is the day any better? No sun shines on Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno, which finds the Italian filmmaker back on the road and on unfamiliar ground (and water, again, so much water) after two award-winning films shot in his home country (Sacro GRA, 2013; Fire at Sea, 2016). Notturno was…

In his Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes identified two elements at work in the act of viewing photographs. On one level was what he labelled the studium, which he defines as a sympathetic interest on the part of the viewer, “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, but without special acuity…To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, for culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract between creators and consumers.” The second level of engagement he called the punctum, “that element which will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises…

It is sadly ironic that the Criterion Collection’s release of the new restoration of Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad (1964)—which is also included as part of the label’s massive box set 100 Years of Olympic Films, 1912–2012—followed closely on the heels of the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now optimistically rescheduled for 2021, the Games are scheduled to reuse some of the same sites as the ’64 edition (the Budokan for judo, the Tange Kenzo-designed Yoyogi National Gymnasium for handball, the Baji Koen Park for equestrian events), and the proceedings are once again to be filmed by a noted Japanese filmmaker, Kawase Naomi. Kawase had originally conceived of her Olympic film as a testament to Japan’s recovery from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and…

Presented as a “new” documentary of which Orson Welles is the credited director, Hopper/Welles is at once less and more than whatever would accurately befit that pithy description. On the one hand, the film is, in fact, 130 minutes of Dennis Hopper, operating in peak mysterious-sage-poet-cinematic-warlord fashion, captured roughly halfway between the production and release of his totemic masterpiece, The Last Movie (1971). As such, it stands in opposition to L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller’s scripted/performed The American Dreamer (1971). An opening title card establishes “Los Angeles, November 1970,” though it’s unclear when exactly this was filmed in relation to Carson and Schiller’s film, as Hopper looks like he just stepped off its set, and engages in copious familiar pensive beardstroking. As well, Hopper riffs on one of his…

Although greeted with almost unanimously positive reviews, the HBO series Silicon Valley—which chronicled the misadventures of a promising tech startup called Pied Piper over 53 halfhour episodes from April 2014 to December 2019—was not one of those series breathlessly hyped every other week or considered a mainstream smash during a past decade that overenthusiastically embraced serialized, streaming product. But with its casual commentary on the false promises and inherent dangers of technological advances (which have enabled the success of streaming services, amongst other things), Silicon Valley feels like one of the defining series of this fucked-up decennium in retrospect. It also fits the pattern of the best and most resonant works created by that quasi-anthropological satirist Mike Judge, whose mixture of pointed and subversive social observations with a certain humanist…

The role of past insights in (still) present-day struggles is at the heart of The Inheritance, a playful, erudite, and boundary-blurring examination of what performing Black theory, literature, music, and testimony in a contemporary Philadelphia commune might set in motion. Given even greater topicality by the current moment, Ephraim Asili’s first feature has no problems transcending it, not least in its insistence on continuity and process. Too smart to trade in conventional activism and too wry and funky to feel overly academic, Asili’s unique project is ultimately about intertwining theory and practice and making sure both are passed on to the next generation, an idea that reverberates far beyond the walls of the house. The founding of the commune that forms the film’s central setting hinges on a literal inheritance,…

In Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, oafish antihero Nick Dunne owns and manages a bar in his hometown with sister Margot, which they cheekily name “The Bar,” later called “very meta” by the detective investigating Nick for his wife’s murder. The hometown is Carthage, Missouri, characterized as “not prosperous anymore, not by a long shot.” Nick’s wife Amy provided the seed capital with a loan from her trust fund; the book repeatedly invokes the 2008 financial crisis as a partial explanation for the couple’s move back home as well as for the town’s “roving bands of homeless,” some of whom take shelter in the abandoned Riverway Mall. The unmistakable subtext is that Nick, Amy, and, by extension, Margot, are gentrifiers, whose wealth allows them suburban distance from the town’s collapsing…

“It’s all planned, but it isn’t thought out,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review of A Woman Under the Influence (1974), a nifty bit of critical jiu-jitsu turning John Cassavetes’ much-theorized—and, during Kael’s reign at The New Yorker, much-derided—technique of spontaneous improvisation within a dramatic framework against him. For Kael, Cassavetes’ singular talent was for conveying the inchoate agony of “intense suffering from nameless causes;” however, watching this approach deployed in a character study about a schizophrenic wife and mother subjected to shock treatment, she perceived only sadistic indulgence masquerading as empathy. Hence Kael’s disparaging assessment of A Woman Under the Influence as a “murky, ragmop movie” punctuated by moments of “idiot symbolism,” and built around a performance by Gena Rowlands that was “enough for a half dozen tours de…

Given the right-wing accelerationism that has marked the response to the pandemic carried out by the governments of my country, state, and city (New York City, where a death toll approaching 25,000 ostensibly constitutes a successful response to the virus), it has been a troubling time to engage with Inventing the Future, the new feature by Isiah Medina. Based—a word I use advisedly and with the blessing of the film’s credits—on Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ 2015 book of the same name, one of the more visible texts to emerge from the tendency towards a tech-driven, future-oriented thinking on the left over the last decade gathered under the name accelerationism, it is a film whose complicated relationship with time in terms of both form and content rhymes with a sense…

“Working in Bengal, we are obliged morally and artistically to make films that have their roots in the soil of our province.”—Satyajit Ray, 1958 “A whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be a history of powers…”—Michel Foucault, 1980 In a recent article published in advance of the restoration and rerelease of his work, filmmaker and writer Ruchir Joshi detailed the context for creative Indian documentary in the late ’80s, just as he was developing his practice: Independent documentary makers tended to attempt only two or three kinds of non-fiction films: Films commissioned by NGOs, “activist” films around a social or political issue about which the filmmaker felt passionately, and films to do with culture, usually traditional craft or performance. Both emerging out of…

“We no longer have time for the paternal and revolutionary erections. Expression is the end of the internal, in the arrogance of producing ourselves (me, the author). What has been disintegrated is the concept of authorship.”—Carmelo Bene Carmelo Bene always had very little to do with the provincial history of Italian cinema and its self-congratulatory antics. “Culturally I’m not Italian, but Arab,” he told Jean Narboni in an interview for Cahiers du cinéma in 1968, reclaiming his geohistorical lineage while simultaneously denying the existence of a national culture. Born in the “ethnic mayhem” of Otranto—“a most religious bordello, a centre of culture and tolerance to bring together Islamic, Jewish, Turkish, and Catholic confluences”—Bene dedicated his life to the manic deconstruction of any form of identity, including his own. Far from…

No credits ever rupture the cloistered world of Équation a un inconnu (1980), the lone feature directed by the artist Francis Savel, working under the pseudonym “Dietrich de Velsa.” A gay pornographic odyssey through end-of-the-’70s Paris, the film is a universe unto itself, its title written in chalk on a concrete underpass, linking a hustler’s graffiti to a mathematician’s scrawl, and the names of its various players whispered over a closing bike ride like some sweetly savoured memory. Hardcore action notwithstanding, its atmosphere is one of hushed, almost ceremonial remoteness—fitting enough given that the film inhabits the vanished spaces of a bygone era. Équation premiered at the Dragon Club, a now-shuttered gay porn cinema that once counted Roland Barthes among its regular patrons—though “premiere” is perhaps too ostentatious a term…

“You fight for a cause you barely understand,” Kenneth Branagh’s Blofeldesque villain shouts into a receiver late in Christopher Nolan’s laborious puzzle-box thriller Tenet. Delivered across space and time in a literal game of broken telephone to John David Washington’s evocatively named “Protagonist,” that line may be a self-reflexive wink at the director’s famously tangled plotting, whose messiness is ever at odds with his penchant for tailored suits and natty ascots. It’s an open question as to whether this reference to the indecipherable forces that hold our Protagonist in thrall is meant as a kind of mission statement for the film, but—arriving as it does nearly two-and-ahalf hours into an ostensible science-fiction movie whose world-building is as shabby as drywall—such a sentiment only draws attention to the film’s own weightlessness…