Innehållsförteckning för Issue 88 - Fall 2021 från Cinema Scope

I Peter Tscherkassky’s 20-minute film Train Again unearths some new materialist marvels while expanding on those typically Tscherkasskian sensations the Austrian filmmaker achieves through the technique of contact printing, in which found footage is copied by hand, frame by frame, onto unexposed film stock. His announcement reads as follows: “18 years after Kurt Kren produced his third film, 3/60 Bäume im Herbst (3/60 Trees in Autumn), he shot his masterpiece 37/78 Tree Again. 18 years after I created my third darkroom film L’Arrivée (an homage to the Lumiere brothers and their 1895 L’arrivé d’un train), I embarked on Train Again. This film is an homage to Kurt Kren that simultaneously taps into a classic motif in film history. My darkroom ride took a few years, but we finally arrived: All…

About an hour into Streetwise—Martin Bell, Cheryl McCall, and Mary Ellen Mark’s 1984 documentary about teenage street hustlers in downtown Seattle—a 16-year-old boy named Rat appears in close-up, puffing a cigarette, while on the opposite side of the frame a pink-and-yellow neon car wash sign rotates and flickers against the blue-grey sky at dusk. A long lens collapses foreground and background, making equal in size and iconic stature the gorgeously garish mid-century sign, and the runaway who dumpster-dives for food and “rolls queers” for cash. Speaking in voiceover, 14-year-old prostitute Erin “Tiny” Blackwell talks of her love for Rat, and describes his eyes—“I think they’re brown or blue; one or the other”—as Rat bends his head to re-light his cigarette. We hear the flick of the light-er, one beat after…

When, due to financial reasons, Leos Carax was forced to shoot Holy Motors (2012) on digital video rather than film, something in him must have cracked. In one particularly memorable scene, Carax crosscuts between tawdry CGI dragons in heat and mock-cunnilingus performed by two writhing bodies wearing motion-capture suits (one of whom is, of course, Carax’s nimble avatar Denis Lavant). What soon becomes clear is that these ultramodern technologies have got nothing on the basic interplay between light and sound in capturing the body in motion, in all its grace, vigour, and vulgarity. This cynical attitude toward the advent of digital technologies marked a departure from the tormented lyricism of the director’s previous work. Though the pre-digital Carax certainly commingled artifice with reality, Holy Motors explicitly deconstructs the medium of…

“Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus In the seven years since P’tit Quinquin, it has become impossible to continue tagging Bruno Dumont with the longstanding cliches of Bresson criticism. Epithets like “ascetic,” “severe,” “punishing”—already limited descriptors of his first two works, La vie de Jésus (1997) and L’humanité (1999)—have only become more obviously incapable of describing Dumont’s recent films, from the carnivalesque contortions of Ma Loute (2016) to the musical extremes of his Jeanne d’Arc movies. Still, as Dumont’s methods (particularly his increasingly frequent use of professionals alongside non-actors) have ostensibly moved away from those of Bresson, the deeper affinities between the two filmmakers have only become clearer. More effectively than did Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), Ma Loute demonstrated that the…

The films of multimedia artist Neelon Crawford have been out of circulation since his retirement from filmmaking in the mid-’80s. But before leaving the medium behind to focus on his successful career in fine-art photography and painting, Crawford produced a rich body of meditative, diaristic films that interrogate the moving-image phenomenon even while expressing a profound reverence for the beauties of the natural world. Several of Crawford’s works were featured in Cineprobe, The Museum of Moderrn Art’s prestigious experimental film showcase that ran from 1968 to 2002, and in 2016 the museum acquired the complete elements and prints of all 35 of his films, and began the work of digital preservation. The results of these efforts are now on view in curators Ron Magliozzi and Brittany Shaw’s exhibition and screening…

It’s not immediately clear who the protagonist of James Vaughan’s debut feature is. Following the credits, which play over a montage of 18th-century artist William Bradley’s watercolours of English ships docking in Sydney (the settlement’s first representation in Western art), we are shown a sunny park on the edge of Sydney’s harbour, where stray figures gaze out at the glittering water as if they’re in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. It’s a scene in which it would be difficult to recognize the lanky Ray (Fergus Wilson), his features indistinct in the middle distance, as the anchor of any forthcoming narrative, and that subtle sense of rootlessness continues as Vaughan proceeds to cut to the skyscrapers and eerily underpopulated streets of Brisbane. That initial sensation of displacement does…

If you follow Sean Baker’s Letterboxd account—as of this writing, more than 68,000 people do—you may have noticed his deep dive into sexploitation and commedia sexy all’italiana (especially those featuring the Lolita-esque Ornella Muti) during much of the latter half of last year. (Not to mention a couple rewatchings of The Sugarland Express [1974].) One of American cinema’s most studious filmmakers, Baker was prepping for his typically resourceful new film, Red Rocket, which came together in a flash in time to premiere in the Cannes Competition yet nevertheless feels like a wholly resolved, even necessary object. Set in Texas City against the backdrop of the looming 2016 election and filmed amidst an ongoing pandemic, Red Rocket is a portrait of two overlapping Before Times that itself frames a narrative image…

“Animation and comics are parallel industries that are dominated, unfortunately, by commercial interests, hacks, and bozos,” brooded animator and cartoonist Dash Shaw on the sorry state of his twin vocations in Artforum in 2015. Though this blanket statement might seem to overlook the tremendous artistry that has so often overlapped between these “parallel industries”—we need only mention here Little Nemo creator Winsor McCay’s pioneering animated shorts, or Miyazaki Hayao’s masterful Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (not just the 1984 anime, but the 1,000-pluspage manga)—it’s nevertheless true that these mutually degraded fields often yield poor crops. Yet Shaw, one of the few prominent cartoonist-animators currently working, still tills them with diligence, and with his handmade, DIY approach he’s likely the only one getting equally ink-stained with his animation and…

The erotic history of the car in cinema extends back nearly to the dawn of the medium: there’s Chaplin, in 1914, asserting in his first film that he’s a more enticing view than the soapbox derbies at the Kid Auto Races (no engines yet). Though the death-drive desires Chaplin glimpsed would go on being worked out by Lloyd and Keaton up through Crash (1996) and Death Proof (2007), the human-car relationship has generally been more accommodating, less overt in its violence. The car is context, an acutely American site for allowing public and private to mingle in little eddies of erotic energy, a dynamic whose extratextual apotheosis is the mirror-stage kitsch of the mid-century drive-in. The savour of that context, unsurprisingly given the volume of examples, varies wildly. And of…

There is a dream in In Front of Your Face, Hong Sangsoo’s 26th feature, which screened in the inaugural “Cannes Premieres” sidebar, but this is a dream that, for once, we will not see. Hong’s films often feature unexpected awakenings from dreams in which the protagonist is stuck without the spectator’s prior knowledge, but the joke this time consists of arousing curiosity only to indefinitely postpone its satisfaction. Returning to Seoul after years of absence, the film’s protagonist, Sangok (Lee Hyeyeong), wants to hear about the dream her sister, Jeongok (Cho Yunhee), just woke up from, but Jeongok superstitiously believes that one should never reveal the nature of a good dream before noon. At the end of a morning walk, Sangok asks her sister again about her dream, but, unfortunately,…

“This is the unwieldy version of the movie,” said Quentin Tarantino on the Pure Cinema podcast in June about his new 400-page novelization of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). “Unwieldy” is indeed the right adjective for QT’s new make-work project, and it’s also probably the last word on his creative sensibility. The bantering gangsters so loquaciously comparing tipping etiquette at the outset of Reservoir Dogs (1992) were signal figures, not only in terms of their mutual look, attitude, and affect—all cool, as Jules Winnfield might say, as a bunch of Fonzies—but also in their penchant for an aggro digressiveness that would in turn become the lingua franca of indiedom. The slow rotation of the camera around the gang’s diner-table confab cinches the joke of men talking in circles to…

The appeal of dystopian narratives hangs on their capacity to hold up a funhouse mirror to the corruption and exploitation of our already extant social realities. Indigenous artists and filmmakers have long underscored the dystopic reality of colonial nation states in their work, and the uptick in dystopic genre cinema over the past decade—from the YA likes of The Hunger Games and Maze Runner to the nihilistic parables of Black Mirror and the Purge franchise—has also seen a corresponding rise in Indigenous engagement with the tropes of horror and science fiction, most notably in the oeuvre of Jeff Barnaby (Rhymes for Young Ghouls, 2013; Blood Quantum, 2019). One of the most intriguing manifestations of this is the interdisciplinary art movement called Indigenous Futurisms (a term coined by the Anishinaabe Indigenous…

M. Night Shyamalan’s Old never references Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (the film is an adaptation of a French graphic novel called Sandcastle), nor does it attempt to create visual equivalents of Carroll’s impossible objects, as Disney did in its 1951 adaptation. Nonetheless, there remains a strong affinity between Carroll’s stories and Shyamalan’s film, for Old—which follows an American family on a tropical getaway who are unwittingly brought to a beach that makes them age at a rate of one year every 30 minutes—is primarily concerned with a problem that was often gobsmackingly explored by Carroll: What is the structure of nonsense? Or, to put the question more concretely: what makes Wonderland and the Old beach such strange and unnerving places? Consider an early…

Like all of Maria Speth’s films, Mr. Bachmann and His Class is a sharply observed portrait of people negotiating their way through uncertain, liminal spaces. At the same time, the documentary marks a sharp turn in Speth’s filmmaking approach, something all the more notable given the remarkable consistency of her first four films. The Days Between (2001), Madonnas (2007), Daughters (2014), and the documentary 9 Lives (2011) were all characterized by Speth’s intensive focus on individuals (mostly young women) living on the margins of contemporary German society who actively flout the rules of bourgeois decorum as well as sexist assumptions about how “proper” women ought to behave. By contrast, Speth’s new film finds her practically reinventing her approach to cinema. Clocking in at 217 minutes, Mr. Bachmann is as capacious…

While parental absence is a key trope of so many of the Spielberg(ian) youth films of ’80s Hollywood cinema—not only E.T. (1982), but also The Outsiders (1983), Explorers (1985), The Goonies (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Monster Squad (1987), et al.—the aloneness of the young protagonists is always more a matter of narrative pretext than actual subject. Loneliness in these boy-centric films is only the necessary condition for the characters’ adventures, and is quickly remedied by burgeoning (male-only) friendships, parental reconciliations, or both. It’s thus all the more interesting to note the emergence of a series of independent films from the same period, all of them orbiting around young female characters—including Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Mark’s documentary Streetwise (1984), Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk (1985), and Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987)—in…

So may we stop (talking about COVID yet)? If, like me, you were fortunate enough to spend some time in the south of France this past July, the answer is a resounding “no.” And thankfully it was a sweltering summer, for if an event like the one Cannes mounted was to take place mostly with indoor dining, the film world would see numbers the size of Florida. That’s because, in France, many viewers and all the locals put COVID aside and behaved as though the pandemic, if not being over, at least took a pause for a Fortnight. I lost track of the number of times the Trumpian claim was advanced from the stage of the Debussy by the ruling dictatorship that “There is no COVID in Cannes,” as if…

Nadav Lapid continues to take a scalpel to contemporary Israel in Ahed’s Knee, although this particular dissection might leave a bigger scar. The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) and Synonyms (2019) already flirted with autobiography, but his fourth feature pushes forward into full autofiction, sending a director named Y. (Avshalom Pollak) to the Arava desert for a screening of one of his films, only to discover that open discussion of its content is frowned upon. The director’s response may be blunt, even strident, but the film’s own approach to perspective is far more nuanced, as Lapid’s state-of-the-nation ideas are refracted through Shai Goldman’s agitated, intricate camerawork to exhilarating effect. As Y. himself remarks at the beginning of the screening, pay attention to the style. As he heads to the desert, Y. is…

2020 may go down as The Year From Hell, but at least it gave us The Tsugua Diaries. Rudely interrupted by the COVID pandemic in proceeding with not one, but two productions—Savagery and Grand Tour—Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes opted to do exactly the opposite of what everyone, including undoubtedly the Portuguese Film Commission, expected: they went and made a movie, deciding, just like the NBA, to create a bubble environment (at a farmhouse compound near the Atlantic coast) and hope for the best. This would include the crew being prepped under the film commission’s COVID guidelines by an official in a hazmat suit and face shield. The action might even include lips-on-lips kissing. And, to add to the degree of difficulty, Fazendeiro was several months into her pregnancy with…

In July of this year, II Cinema Ritrovato ran a strand on Indian Parallel Cinema (curated by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Cecilia Cenciarelli, and Omar Ahmed) featuring some of the finest works from this important movement, which dates roughly from the late ’60s to the ’80s. Although its inception was first proclaimed, in appropriately revolutionary terms, in that fateful year of 1968 with the publication of Manifesto of the New Cinema Movement (authored by filmmakers Arun Kaul and Mrinal Sen), Parallel Cinema’s orientation toward a realism that spotlighted the lives of those peoples generally excluded from mainstream cinema made it a natural heir to the groundbreaking Bengali-language art cinema of the ’50s and ’60s—Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy (1955-59), Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition Trilogy (1960-65)—as well as socially committed works by mainstream Hindi-language…

“One. Year. Hence.” It’s Christmas at Camelot in the opening act of David Lowery’s Arthurian fantasy when the severed head of the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) utters this ominous tagline, heralding two of the film’s most persistent structural elements: the cycles of nature and the ineffable logic of fairy tales. A double prologue signals the mysticism and earthiness we expect of medieval fantasy: a prophetic voice, a king with orb and sceptre, an icon set alight; a hasty departure from a barnyard in winter. The barnyard abuts a brothel, where the king’s nephew, Gawain (Dev Patel), is awakened by his lover, Essel (Alicia Vikander). “Christ is born,” she greets him; “Christ is born indeed,” he answers. No, the hungover Gawain was not at mass all night; his Marian icon of…

From Dragnet, “The Big Departure” (Jack Webb, 1968): Kid, a would-be revolutionary just busted for stealing, among other things, asparagus seeds, with plans to cultivate them on the commune where he’s starting a new society: “Oh, yeah, I really dig fresh asparagus.” Sgt. Joe Friday, arresting officer: “When do you think you’ll eat it?” Kid: “This summer.” Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus took four. A handcrafted surrealist masterpiece and in every sense a labour of l’amour fou, the extraordinary Asparagus—in a which a femme sans visage takes pleasure in her garden and shares the bounty of her unearthly delights with a mesmerized audience, all before performing fellatio on an alchemical assortment of possibilities—was animated and assembled between 1974 and 1978. Absolutely of its moment and ethereally out of time, it’s a movie…