Innehållsförteckning för Issue 86 - Spring 2021 från Cinema Scope

I will never know how you see red, and you will never know how I see it; but this separation of consciousnesses is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.—Maurice Merleau-Ponty Near the midpoint of The Girl and the Spider—Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s overdue, much anticipated follow-up to their masterful debut feature, The Strange Little Cat (2013)—a character launches into another of the Zürcher brothers’ distinctive anecdotal monologues. Mara (Henriette Confurius), who is as close as this film gets to a protagonist, describes for her neighbour, Kerstin (Dagna Litzenberger-Vinet), an incident that occurred the previous day between herself and her newly ex-roommate (and perhaps ex-girlfriend) Lisa (Liliane Amuat). “I was in my room while Lisa was on…

During its rocky 20th century, Taiwan spent 50 years as a Japanese colony following the Sino-Japanese War before being abruptly returned to Chinese rule at the end of World War II under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) government. While Chiang’s forces battled Mao Zedong’s Communists on the Mainland, Taiwan’s public and private sectors crumbled from neglect and the rampant corruption of the island’s KMT executive, a situation that was only exacerbated by the arrival of progressive waves of refugees from the Mainland as the Communists gradually overwhelmed the KMT. When Chiang himself was driven to Taipei in 1949, and soon thereafter declared Taipei the capital of the exiled Republic of China government, he doubled down on the brutal repression of suspected communists that had begun with the notorious massacre of February…

Bobby Seale makes a cameo of sorts midway through Judas and the Black Messiah, as Martin Sheen’s porcine J. Edgar Hoover—checking in personally on the progress of the FBI’s campaign against Chicago Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya)—is shown an artist’s sketch of the BPP’s national chairman gagged and shackled in the courtroom during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. This revolting spectacle understandably serves as the mid-film dramatic highpoint of The Trial of the Chicago 7, when the repeated, suitably indignant demands by Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to serve as his own defense counsel in the absence of his hospitalized lawyer—and presiding judge Julius Hoffman’s (Frank Langella) incredible refusal to grant this right, instead directing that Seale’s defense should be undertaken by the representatives for the other defendants—ultimately lead…

The finest genre study I know is Pursuits of Happiness, Stanley Cavell’s 1981 examination of seven Hollywood comedies— The Lady Eve (1941), It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Adam’s Rib (1949), and The Awful Truth (1937)—that exemplify what he calls the “comedy of remarriage,” where the drive of the plot is “not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again.” Along with his previous book on cinema, The World Viewed (whose 50th anniversary this year occasioned the publication of a new collection, The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema), Pursuits is widely and deservedly considered the American philosopher’s principal contribution to film studies. For the pleasure Cavell took in its conception, it is…

One of the few major festivals to have taken place physically in the first three months of 2020, before others were forced to abandon or adapt their programs in the year’s long back half, the International Film Festival Rotterdam has reimagined its structure for 2021 in celebration of the festival’s 50th anniversary, which also unfortunately doubles as the first anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak. The first festival under new artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic, this anniversary edition featured a mix of temporary and permanent adjustments, the most significant of the former being a split in this year’s presentation between a reduced February program and a second installment in June, the month of the festival’s original presentation in 1972. The June edition will feature the festival’s Bright Future section (reduced in scale…

Entering Riz Ahmed in the disability cosplay sweepstakes as a young drummer coping with hearing loss, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal originated as a lightly meta vehicle for husband-and-wife sludge-metal duo Jucifer to be directed by Derek Cianfrance, with whom Marder co-wrote The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). That the final result is more surprising than the rote uplift narrative suggested by its edifying logline is a testament to both Ahmed’s cagey intensity and the fact that Marder, making his fiction-feature debut here, proves to have sharper instincts as a storyteller than his more schematic Pines partner (who retains a story credit on the film). However, that the film is ultimately as vulnerable to thematic shortcuts and unsatisfying pronouncements as any other disability melodrama—a genre that requires lessons be learned,…

Following a run of creative setbacks and course corrections, Denis Côté returns to magnificent form with Hygiène sociale, a piercingly funny and exquisitely shot work that finds the Québécois filmmaker casting a critical eye on the nature of his art and the era in which it is now being asked to thrive. No mere pandemic film (the script was largely written in 2015), Côté’s latest instead turns our current circumstances into a means for reflection, analysis, and confrontation with the very tools and convictions that have made him into one of contemporary cinema’s most prolific and unclassifiable directors. At a time when the very concepts of serious-minded filmmaking and theatrical exhibition are being called into question by streaming giants and IP managers with zero investment in the sustainability of the…

Consider the strange history of the lyrical film. We can, according to its christener and chief exegete, identify the advent of this form with uncommon specificity: the creation by Stan Brakhage, in 1959, of Anticipation of the Night. “The lyrical film,” P. Adams Sitney writes, “postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film.” Its means of achieving this are, again, gratifyingly specific: “it proposes camera movement as the elementary figure of filmic structure.” And while Sitney’s investment in both Brakhage’s centrality to American film culture and his own role in promoting that narrative are enough to prompt second thoughts, I can nonetheless see little reason to argue with his claim that the lyrical mode came to be so common within the New American Cinema—the avant-garde…

Forty minutes into his incendiary final film The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), Fritz Lang invents a formal manoeuvre that has been imitated ever since: the camera, framing for a two-shot, pulls back to reveal that the initial image, far from being the product of an omniscient perspective, is actually the live feed of a surveillance monitor, a frame within a frame. By giving potential narrative motivation to the placement of the camera at any particular moment in the film, the German master makes us aware of the fact that assuming one position will necessarily preclude the possibility of viewing from another. What matters most in Thousand Eyes is not determining the veracity of an event—as one moment’s truth, seen from a particular vantage, will often be revealed to…

If you find yourself in Manhattan’s Lower East Side around Delancey Street—where the painted pink-purple steel of the Williamsburg Bridge dumps cars straight into the pizza, graffiti, and cellphone store-clogged heart of the city and where cyclists and pedestrians make the steep climb upward and over the East River—you’ll pass through the long shadow of Essex Crossing, a towering apartment complex that is the latest and most egregious monument to gentrification in the historically immigrant-heavy, working-class neighbourhood. Along with these new luxury residences, you’ll also find Essex Market, a food court filled with high-quality meats, cute bakeries, world cuisine, and a full vegan deli; while there’s no denying the food is good, the pervasive feeling is akin to a Silicon Valley tech campus. As sterile as these new spaces might…

Dream of the perfect life Economic circumstances The body is good business Sell out, maintain the interest—Gang of Four, “Natural’s Not In It” With the arrival of any new Adam Curtis film comes a deluge of coverage, commentaries, analysis, harangues, point-counterpoints, fact checks, further-reading lists, and good old-fashioned snark spread across an ever-expanding plethora of platforms. The resulting cacophony makes one of the fundamental appeals of Curtis’ practice—his seeming ability to wrest a temporary sense of order and coherence from a dense matrix of ideas, factoids, fragments, and audiovisual ephemera from deep within the BBC archive that otherwise threatens to feel as disordered and disorienting as everyday life—seem all the more valuable. Then again, there’s always a trove of quality zingers in the YouTube comment sections for Curtis films that…

When navigating the as-yet-unknown films of a festival program, nationality still provides a persuasive point of reference for some, a feeling underlined by the proud declarations issued by national funding organizations, promotional bodies, or particularly partisan members of the press once titles have been announced. This year’s reduced Berlinale Forum lineup also invites tenuous lines of this kind to be drawn (two films from Argentina, two films from Canada!), although the three Franco-German co-productions shot elsewhere say far more about how films are made in 2021. If such a line thus links Sabrina Zhou’s The Good Woman of Sichuan to Rhayne Vermette’s Ste. Anne, this is not a reason to talk about them together per se. The fact that a 16mm family drama from the Treaty 1 territory and a…

On the set of Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), Delphine Seyrig said, “The common denominator that I share with all women is that I’m an actress. I think that every woman has to be an actress. Actresses do what all women are expected to do. We just throw ourselves into it more.” Promising Young Woman seeks structure through vendetta, and night after night repeats itself as Cassie, the vengeful antiheroine played by Carey Mulligan, “throws herself” into her roles, dressing up in drunk-girl drag—complete with what the late Amy Winehouse dubbed “F me pumps”—to become what she perceives certain types of men want her to be. Winehouse’s 2003 single, however, actually amounts to some wisdom about the lived banality of ceaseless nights out on the town: “You did too much…

Icelandic director Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir’s extraordinarily warming 2019 documentary The Vasulka Effect, about the protean Eurohippies and rightfully dubbed “grandparents of video art,” Steina and Woody Vasulka, was exactly the movie I needed to see this winter. Awash in Nordic echoes even as it confronts the modern realities of art-gallery politics and the history of America’s visual-arts fringes, it’s a mythical origin story that’s actually true, all about ancient heroes and ravaging time. In it, the hot gusts of youth and fertility and cheap loft spaces filled with cheap weed fumes (in the Manhattan of the ’60s) are eventually, in a rhythm any of us codgers can instantly recognize, confronted with the cold winds of accelerating decrepitude. Our heroes appear virtually vanquished, not by enemy blows but by the retreat of…

Fern Silva’s films cannot be described as ethnography, personal/mythopoeic film, or essay filmmaking, although they often partake of all of those modes. Though his films are rooted in particular places and cultural spheres, they assiduously avoid the rhetorical or declarative traps of typical nonfiction filmmaking. Instead, they envelop the viewer in a diffuse but concrete ambiance, conveying the palpability of land and water, the weight of the air surrounding hills and trees. They represent a doubled physicality—the world as unavoidably there, inseparable from the cinematic substrate of 16mm filmmaking itself—and the result is a hybridized form of documentary “fiction,” in the classical Latin sense. Silva’s films are made, formed in the interface between reality and those human and mechanical processes that bring it into being. Fittingly enough, Silva’s feature debut,…

Some of the posters lining the city walls visible in the background of scenes admonish the reader to “Learn to swim!” while others illustrate the political frontlines of the time (“Hitler–Against Hunger!”). The setting is Berlin, 1931, and the protagonist, Jakob Fabian, is trying to stay adrift in the capital of the doomed Weimar Republic, making a somewhat rhetorical if not outright ironic case for “the victory of decency” in the midst of an era marked by sexual escapades and social breakdown. Fabian has a doctorate in German studies and talks about writing the great novel of his time, but survives by filing advertising copy by day while touring hot spots at night with his best friend Stephan Labude, a rich kid pushing the communist cause. Will Fabian learn to…

“Man, I work for an app,” scoffs a bike courier midway through The Beta Test, neatly summing up the subtext of this horror-comedy patched into a matrix of technocratic misanthropy. The title refers to an ad hoc data-mining scheme targeting wealthy entertainment-industry players that baits them into anonymous trysts with algorithmically compatible partners and then shakes down both parties in the aftermath. After a knowingly gratuitous, quasi-De Palma-esque cold open observing the bloody consequences of such cuckery, we meet Hollywood packaging agent Jordan Hines (co-writer-director Jim Cummings), who’s received a deep-purple envelope containing a questionnaire about his sexual preferences and fetishes—an engraved invitation designed to lead upwardly mobile, soon-to-be newlyweds like himself into temptation. It’s a short push, of course, and the ease with which Jordan’s one-track mind gets rerouted…

Her reflection comes as a revelation. In the safety of her bedroom, Connie (Laura Dern), the 15-year-old protagonist of Joyce Chopra’s 1985 feature debut Smooth Talk (recently released on a Criterion Blu-ray), adjusts her new halter top in the mirror, its strings crisscrossed down the middle of her chest to hang limp over her exposed midriff. The camera observes her in profile as she spins and arches her back, her gaze glued to the supple body in the reflection, luxuriating in her new possession. This scene rhymes with another that Chopra filmed about 15 years prior to the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, at a time when the possibility of her directing a feature must have seemed nearly impossible: in the opening shot of Joyce at 34 (1972),…

The weather at Sundance this year was great—mostly sunny, a steady 74 degrees Fahrenheit, based on my indoor AC monitor—although the wind in my Southern California desert backyard did kick up from time to time. But at the actual Sundance, not the virtual one attendees were experiencing through their computer monitors, serious questions were in the air. Now that the cinema world was a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, what movies would be done and available? Would anything premiering be worth a damn after sitting on the shelf for nearly 12 months? Were the good movies being held back in the hope that actual festivals would kick back into gear by, oh, late spring? (Hope springs eternal.) That last question was the one that really mattered, one that pestered the…

In 1977, Philip K. Dick gave a speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” in which he revealed that many of his dystopian novels weren’t the products of his imagination or dreams, but came from recovered memories of actual alternate worlds. Dick was entirely sincere, and this realization plagued him. Footage of this speech (and of Dick’s skeptical French audience) punctuate Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, which explores the psychological and cultural impacts of that moment when science fiction seeps into our reality. In Ascher’s documentary Room 237 (2012), we hear narrators discuss their interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980). Though the theories range from the reasonable to the ridiculous, they are all essentially presented the same way:…

In his 2015 documentary Coming of Age, director Teboho Edkins followed a group of teenagers who plan to depart their rural village in Lesotho—the landlocked nation within South Africa where the Tennessee-born, now Berlin-based filmmaker spent his childhood and adolescence—to study in Cape Town, a premise which allowed Edkins to investigate societal inequalities in both communities and, more broadly, Lesotho’s relationship with a modernizing world. While Days of Cannibalism, like most of Edkins’ work to date, retains that focus on Lesotho, the scope of the director’s fourth nonfiction feature is global in nature, detailing an improbable economic hyperlink between Lesotho and China’s southeastern Fujian province. In response to economic precarity, migrants from Fujian have travelled to the village of Thaba-Tseka in eastern Lesotho—a predominantly agricultural community populated by the Basotho…