Innehållsförteckning för Issue 90 - Spring 2022 från Cinema Scope

In “The Present Absence,” his introductory essay for the Austrian Film Museum’s English-language monograph dedicated to Ruth Beckermann, Nick Pinkerton pinpoints the central question that has animated much of Beckermann’s work as a filmmaker, writer, editor, photographer, and installation artist over the past five decades: “What then is to be done? How is a past no one wants to remember to be regained for posterity?” Born in postwar Vienna to Holocaust survivors, Beckermann has devoted her career to excavating, with a dogged curiosity, the social, political, and economic histories of 19th- and 20th-century Austria, always balancing a sincere generosity toward her human subjects with a precise critique of the systems in which they work, worship, strive, and struggle. Mutzenbacher, her twelfth feature and winner of the Best Film prize in…

In all art there seems to be some principle of recurrence related to the repetitions of nature that conditions our sense of time—not just the passage of the seasons, but also the cycles of light and darkness, of waking and sleeping life. The films of Mikhaël Hers are no exception, though as with most any artist, he has his predilections. Some of his films’ titles are suggestive in this regard: Ce sentiment de l’été (2015) expresses his affinity for summer, while his latest, Les passagers de la nuit, points to an alliance with the desires of the night. This is not to say that Hers’ films are exclusively set on summer evenings, only that, no matter the setting or season, he tends to view things from outside the daily frustrations…

Before he became a 21st-century Stanley Kramer, cited by GQ in a recent profile as “the grown-up in the room,” Adam McKay played the more comfortable role of American comedy’s slouchy, politically savvy older brother. Improbable as his progressive-daddy glow up of the past few years might seem, the Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder, former Saturday Night Live head writer, and Academy Award-winning writer-director planted the seed of his transformation early in his predominantly unserious comedy fare. Take Step Brothers (2008), where we meet Derek (Adam Scott), the bane of developmentally arrested fortysomething protagonists Brennan and Dale’s (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly) existence, not least because he’s Brennan’s more accomplished younger brother. McKay immediately paints the oily helicopter leasing agent as the picture of American largesse in a self-contained introductory…

Commissioned and edited by filmmakers and scholars Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada is a necessary and overdue contribution to Canadian film history. Rather than make large, encompassing claims about “Canada” and “Canadian filmmaking,” the book takes the “moments” from its title as a structuring device, combining concise but informative glances at pictures and practitioners into an expansive survey. York University professor Michael Zryd authors the first and longest section, which takes on the unenviable task of providing an overview of the history of the Canadian avant-garde scene(s) from an institutional perspective; the second half, written predominantly by filmmaker and author Stephen Broomer, offers biographies of major filmmakers and close readings of their works. Intended as both a reference work and part of a…

An antidote as much as a film, Gastón Solnicki’s A Little Love Package is a time(less) capsule that offers refuge from the onslaught of a reality that is becoming increasingly catastrophic, at least for those who have been lucky enough to reside far from the violent vortex of history. What was until very recently relegated to the safe and spectacular distance of the big screen is now getting uncomfortably closer to the comfortable lives of those who would have never thought to endure, in their lifetimes at least, pandemics, war, and misery. Solnicki’s film is not so much an antidote to this new, creeping reality, but to the loss of sensitivity upon which it is premised. This sensitivity is aesthetically rescued at the very beginning of the film, when a…

“I do wonder sometimes if you are perpetuating an archetype of epicurean toxicity with all this culinary hysteria,” muses Jan (Gwendoline Christie) to her latest group of artists in residence at the Sonic Catering Institute, the cultural institution Peter Strickland has concocted for his fifth feature. “I do not want to give the public the impression we are espousing any kind of dysfunctional alimentary ideology.” Played by Christie with an appropriately delicious degree of hauteur, the directrix would undoubtedly be perturbed by Strickland’s willingness to espouse dysfunctions of just about every conceivable variety with Flux Gourmet. At once the director’s most perverse and most pointed and carefully controlled fea-ture to date, it firms up Strickland’s status as the most unabashedly Buñuelian filmmaker of his day—or at least the only one…

Depending who you ask, Rimini will have varying connotations. For cinephiles, the Adriatic city is Fellini’s birthplace, a (reconstructed) setting in his films à clef I Vitelloni (1953) and Amarcord (1973). For Germans and Austrians of the boomer generation, a summer vacation in Rimini used to represent the epitome of la dolce vita, drawing them in such numbers that the beaches earned the charming nickname “Teutonic grill.” Whereas for snobbish Italians like myself, who have never set foot there, the place is associated with tacky holidays and hellish images of a vast coastline swarming with sunbathers. Rimini plays with all of the above, though, of course, this being an Ulrich Seidl film, in perverted form. Instead of Amarcord’s adorable grandpa, lost in a fairytale mist on his way home, there’s…

“Colour is swallowed by the dark.”—Leon Battista Alberti “And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.”—Maggie Nelson, Bluets “I place a delphinium, blue, upon your grave.”—Derek Jarman Undoubtedly, the most referenced colour in the history of art has been the colour blue; it is perhaps also the most magnificent. From its invention by the ancient Egyptians, to the painted parchment in medieval Psalters, through Renaissance brocades and vast perspectival grids defined by winsome skies to those manufactured by James Turrell via artificial light or real ones enhanced and framed like sculptures, blue has the undeniable lure and power of a paradoxical emotion: to excite yet…

One time I was leaving Jack Ford’s house because I had a present I wanted to deliver to John Wayne. I told Ford, “It’s Duke’s birthday, I’m going over to give him a book.” “Eh?” he said. Sometimes Ford liked to pretend he was hard of hearing. So I repeated: “It’s Duke’s birthday, I’m going over to give him a book.” “Eh?” he said again. “It’s Duke’s birthday, I’m going over to give him a book.” Then a long pause. Ford says, “Duke’s already got a book.” I heard Peter Bogdanovich tell this story after a screening of The Searchers (1956) at the TIFF Lightbox in 2010. He also told the story about when Orson Welles phoned him for the first time and told him how much he wanted to…

Louis Feuillade occupies a singularly peculiar place in film history. Perhaps this is because for several generations of cinephiles, his work has always seemed just out of reach. His five-part, 330-minute serial Fantômas (1913) was, for many years, far more read about than seen. It was enough of a mainstay of the Cinémathèque française that patrons of the institution’s golden era got plenty of chances to see the whole thing, but like so much from that time- and placebound cinephilia, it didn’t last. The post-cinémathèque and pre-DVD generation would have encountered Feuillade via the Museum of Modern Art’s Circulating Film Library, which circulated a copy of episode two on 16mm, making those 60 minutes something of a film studies classroom staple. That’s how I first encountered the French crime master’s…

Screening in this year’s Berlinale Forum, Éric Baudelaire’s unique take on Luigi Pirandello’s 1923 short play The Man with the Flower in His Mouth assumes the form of a diptych: the first part is an observational documentary of Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, the world’s largest flower market in the Netherlands; the second, a fictional, more explicit adaptation of Pirandello’s text, a conversation taking place over an evening in a Paris bar. While these two modes are held apart structurally, they remain in continual psychic dialogue with each other, creating a multi-directional reading that resists the usual linear path of an adaptation. The Dutch flower market is really something to be seen: it is vast and efficient, with all parts fitting and functioning together, cartons of flowers fitting onto metal trollies that travel…

“Folktales are real.”—Italo Calvino “People see things and talk. Even the rocks know.”—Severino (Severino Sperandio), The Tale of King Crab Where do stories begin, and how and why do they endure? In The Tale of King Crab, directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis expand and deflate, by slyly cinematic means, upon a tradition of racconti popolari and fiabe. The new century has seen the Italian folktale finding renewed fertility through cinema, with De Righi and Zoppis joining a growing chorus of mythogenic filmmakers (including Alice Rohrwacher, Pietro Marcello, Michelangelo Frammartino, Tizza Covi/Rainer Frimmel, and Simone Rapisarda Casanova) who are reckoning with the framing of memory. The most obvious precedent for their approach, Italo Calvino’s midcentury summation Italian Folktales, was itself indebted to the 16th-century The Facetious Nights of…

In a short catalogue note on Joyce Wieland’s La raison avant la passion (1969), Hollis Frampton described this trans-Canadian epic as a film “about the pain and joy of living in a very large space: in fact, in a continent.” Six years later, James Benning and Bette Gordon would make a film that brought many of Wieland’s formal and thematic concerns south of the border, gave it a rather more direct title—The United States of America—and, in appropriately American fashion, cast themselves as demurring stars. Where Wieland’s film consists largely of landscapes seen through the passenger’s window of fast-moving cars, Benning and Gordon placed their camera in the back seat, shooting past themselves through the windshield, as they traversed the States from east to west. And while La raison avant…

In August 2020, Palestinian artist Jumana Manna conceived of a multi-part online screening program for e-flux titled Take Me Back. Highlighting works by both contemporary and historical filmmakers and artists, the series served to examine late 20th- and early 21st-century histories of migration from rural to urban centres—particularly in the Arab world—and work that pushed back against, in her words, “modernity’s disregard for agrarian life.” While the title may have served as a sly nod to the curtailment of global movement as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, six months in, the beautifully polysemous phrase “take me back” serves as a valuable entry point for a consideration of Manna’s own movingimage practice. For Manna, raised in Jerusalem, the most immediate and obvious connection may be drawn to the question of…

Sundance is the only major film festival in at least North America, and quite possibly the world, to create a section dedicated to the experimental/avant-garde and then turn around and destroy that section’s mission. The section is called New Frontiers, which used to be Sundance’s safe harbour for experimentation and, even if on rare occasions, non-narrative work. That was before the invasion of VR, which now has a near-monopoly on the section. Scan through reams of coverage of this heavily reported festival and you won’t land on this fact, which becomes more shocking the more you think about it. Imagine, if you will, TIFF preserving the section name “Wavelengths,” but programming the section with VR projects and relocating the venue to a made-over commercial space somewhere near downtown Toronto. VR…

Shortly before the close of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, word began to circulate that a very successful, cash-flush US distributor had snagged the rights to Nitram, the fifth feature film by Australia’s Justin Kurzel. Although the film didn’t seem to make much of an impression upon its Croisette premiere, the Spike Lee-led jury took notice of Nitram’s star, Caleb Landry Jones, giving him a somewhat unexpected Best Actor prize. This raised the film’s profile of course, but Nitram’s subject matter also seemed destined to pique the interest of certain aggressively hip mini-majors, so everything seemed to be proceeding according to pattern. Then, there was silence: no press release, no public acknowledgment of the deal. Months later, it was in fact IFC Films that had made a deal for Nitram.…

Often praised for their humanist poetics, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s most laureled films have been novelistic family dramas that locate startling profundities within the seemingly ordinary, even banal textures of everyday life, a naturalism that the director strategically glosses with fulgently formalist compositions. From his first narrative feature, Maborosi (1995), through such films as Nobody Knows (2005), Still Walking (2008), I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013), Our Little Sister (2015), After the Storm (2016), and Shoplifters (2019), Kore-eda spins out familial and generational tensions from offscreen instances of death, separation, or abandonment, quietly but empathetically following characters struggling with and attempting to parse their changed circumstances. This thematic consistency has resulted in a compulsion, amongst Anglo-American critics in particular, to bracket off those titles which don’t fit the “official” constellation…