Innehållsförteckning för Issue 95 - Summer 2023 från Cinema Scope

Paul Schrader’s career has been eclectic enough to encompass biopics of Mishima Yukio, Bob Crane, and Patricia Hearst; adaptations of books by Ian McEwan, Russell Banks, and Nikos Kazantzakis; genre films that meet the expectations of the horror, thriller, and romance forms; and star vehicles tailored to bring out the best in icons as disparate at Richard Pryor, Richard Gere, George C. Scott, and Lindsay Lohan. But as with John Ford and his cowboys or Martin Scorsese and his mobsters, when we think of a “Paul Schrader movie,” most of us conjure up a very specific set of themes and images—chief among them that of a solitary man in a mostly empty room, writing in a diary. The image derives, of course, from Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne…

The Cannes Première of Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice’s first feature since Dream of Light (1992) over three decades ago, was immediately followed by a minor controversy. Conspicuously absent from the film’s screening, Erice published an open letter at El País explaining his reasons for boycotting the festival, namely, a marked lack of communication—and an implicit lack of respect—from Thierry Frémaux and his programming team regarding his film’s inclusion in the Official Selection, not in Competition. In its pro forma response, the festival expressed surprise at Erice’s charges, but these details are worth recounting—not because they are likely to affect Erice’s legacy in the slightest, but rather because they provide a useful contrast to his film’s actual preoccupations. As might be expected, given the presence of Spirit of the Beehive…

“Strange people, the Etruscans,” one character muses in Alice Rohrwacher’s new film. “They believed the flight of birds predicted destiny.” It’s unclear exactly what La Chimera’s protagonist—played with the requisite brooding intensity, and a half-decent grasp of Italian, by English actor Josh O’Connor—is able to divine when he looks up late in the film and sees a flock of birds fluttering back and forth across the sky. But imagining that the director has somehow interpreted such patterns to help her determine and calibrate the bustle and flow of her fourth feature is not such a stretch. Prone to veering off in unpredictable directions, La Chimera tumbles and gambols along so heedlessly at times that it ought to be a mess. The fact that everything within the film ultimately proves to…

Spring break forever! Waylaid in Washington, DC on a class trip, freshman Lillian (Talia Ryder) pledges allegiance to the flag, blanks on Upton Sinclair’s name, ignores several famous stone memorials, and engages in some rote debauchery: ass-shaking, glass-raising, freestyling, cum-flinging. “The South shall rise again!” bellows blonde dumbbell Troy (Jack Irv), terrorizing a member of another visiting group. These Harmony-ous antics are played out, and the filmmakers behind The Sweet East know it. (Note that, contra the Indiewire review from Cannes, the film has a screenwriter—Nick Pinkerton, a film critic, programmer, and author making his feature debut—while the director is the well-known cinematographer Sean Price Williams). And so, no more than five minutes after introducing their disaffected heroine—and gifting her a solo, semi-diegetic musical number sung softly over the opening…

Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most complex auteurs of 20th-century cinema. In Italy, the scandal-ridden filmmaker (a defendant in court no less than 33 times) is considered a poet first and foremost. Poetry animated, haunted, and cross-contaminated Pasolini’s pursuits throughout his life. He theorized a “cinema of poetry,” brought the language of filmmaking into his poems, probed his own life and psychology in verse, and lived his defiant and conflicted poetic passion on nightly trips cruising among the ragazzi di vita—his spiritual, aesthetic, sexual, and cultural obsession. For Pasolini, poetry was the pursuit of “a language closer to the world.” In honour of his 101st birthday, the Criterion Collection is releasing Pasolini 101, a box set of his first nine features. Pasolini stated that he made these early…

The reassurance implicit in the coming-ofage story is that of things foregone, universal, known; the particularities of the passage are shorn of their severity and exigence. The subject is supposed, invariably, to have arrived, their journey ultimately delineated in retrospect. The entropy of heightened subjectivity is at last externalized and made legible. The liminality of adolescence, that fount of narrative momentum by which childhood experience becomes patently familiar or perversely exotic, either nostalgic or novel, loses some of its jagged, inscrutable essence in such conventional limning. David Depesseville’s Astrakan would appear, on paper, to typify the genre: 12-year-old orphan Samuel (Mirko Giannini) tries adapting to rural life with his new foster family, their investment in the child more transactional than emotional due to France’s historically subsidized proviso for adoption in…

Reconsideration When a filmmaker’s body of work starts doing the rounds of the cinematheques and museums, it provides an opportunity for re-evaluation or discovery. Even for those of us who are familiar with the cinema of Jean Eustache, the current retrospective, which screens this summer at TIFF Cinematheque and other North American venues, is a substantial reminder that there’s a lot we still don’t know about this singular director. I first encountered Eustache in 2000, when the full retrospective played the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Due to a commercial rerelease of La maman et la putain (1973), I was able to see that film twice, and overall I came away with a general impression of Eustache that has, I think, been conventional wisdom for quite some time—that is, in…

A useful coincidence: I found myself writing this essay in parallel with a brief review of Project for a New American Century, the mid-career survey of artist Josh Kline currently on view at the Whitney Museum. This utility is one of contrast. As Kline, speaking with Laura Poitras in an interview for the exhibition catalogue, has it, “If the world is burning down and you’re choosing to take pictures of flowers—you know, as much as I enjoy beautiful pictures of the flowers, it’s a little odd?” The world is burning down, yes, and the films under consideration in what follows contain a great number of beautiful pictures of flowers. We’ll return to the matter of oddity. So far as recent evidence shows, Kline’s position on the problem of content is…

Have you ever sat in front of a large poster depicting the human body without its skin? One muscle gets entangled into another, the precision and complexity of their web apparent in the areas that are most crucial for movement, but with the face on top of this transparent carcass looking very much alive. One can imagine that Justine Triet, the third female director to receive a Palme d’Or, would be animated rather than revulsed by such a vision. Anatomie d’un chute is her fourth feature, and, like all of her work, it shows a keen interest in the chaos of interwoven movements both toward and away from others that humans somehow revel in testing and rearranging, as if unable to figure out the big picture—and in spite of the…

Among the pantheon of directors whom Pedro Costa habitually invokes when speaking about cinema (Godard, Straub, Ford), the youngest I’ve heard him include, and certainly the only one to have emerged in the 21st century, is Wang Bing. It therefore felt appropriate that Cannes would program the premiere of their respective new films, both relatively short works, as a double bill, with Costa’s eight-minute Daughters of Fire followed by Wang’s 57-minute Man in Black. (The former film was also paired, in a second screening, with Godard’s posthumous Film annonce du film qui n’existera jamais: “Drôles de guerres”, suggesting that the festival was keen to please Costa.) As formal experiments with music, the two films represent forays into territory thus far unexplored by either director. (In Costa’s own words, his 2009…

“The content of my videotape involves documentary subject matter. The visuals combined with music are the attempt to create the mood of the community…in certain sequences light reflections create forms in space.” —Ulysses Jenkins, “Comment on Video Tape” (1977) “This is called Black Montage. This is a conglomeration of some of the great Black heroes in American history.” —Ulysses Jenkins, Remnants of the Watts Festival (1980) Greater than the sum of its individual elements, interests, or artistic approaches, there is a cumulative electricity that runs through the work of American artist Ulysses Jenkins. His is a practice that invites audiences in while at the same time reaching ever outward. That the retrospective exhibition Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation at Berlin’s Julia Stoschek Foundation is able to channel and replicate such…

Genesis: Noah drunkenly falls asleep naked in his tent. Ham wanders in looking for his father, and instead catches a glimpse of the old man’s penis. When Noah wakes up, humiliated, he punishes his son by cursing his lineage. Henceforth, shame springs eternal—dad’s junk can determine the course of generations. So goes the mythic thrust of Ari Aster’s ballsy third picture, Beau Is Afraid, whose impressive endurance over three hours isn’t quite enough to cleave the pin. Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), like many of us in the Semitic tradition, would say he has a mother who is a vindictive, enterprising, narcissistic bitch, and a father who is a monstrous cock and balls—only he wouldn’t be sensationalizing. Tycoon of industry Mona Wassermann, played in her adulthood by a hawkish, astringent, dizzyingly…

“There are several good ways of making French films. Italian-style, like Renoir. Viennese, like Ophüls. New Yorker, like Melville. But only Becker was and is French as France, French as Fontenelle’s rose and Bonnot’s gang.” —Jean-Luc Godard, in his obituary “Frère Jacques” (1960) “Every beautiful film is dedicated almost imperceptibly to someone, and it seems to me that this one might be dedicated to Jacques Becker. It would have touched him profoundly, as it touches everyone who values people over situations, all who think that men are more important than what they do.” —François Truffaut, on Claude Sautet’s Vincent, François, Paul!… et les autres (1974) “Things never happen the way we expect. That is the subject of all my films.” —Claude Sautet, interviewed by Michel Boujot (1995) Some directors seem…

“Everybody wants to be in Cannes Première!” —Thierry Frémaux, quoted in Deadline Dear Thierry Frémaux, I hope this letter finds you amidst a rare moment of clarity, for it is high time that someone shed light on the festering hypocrisy that engulfs the Cannes Film Festival. I write to you today with a heavy heart, consumed by the unyielding anger and frustration that stems from the blatant favoritism and insidious tactics employed by your organization. I write this open letter with profound frustration and disappointment over the programming decisions made for this year’s Cannes. As a filmmaker who has poured my heart and soul into creating thought-provoking and artistically daring works, I cannot help but express my vehement opposition to the relegation of my film, Eureka to the Cannes Première…

At 81 minutes, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves was the shortest film in a bloated Cannes competition. It was also among the best, accomplishing more with less (and in less time) than any number of overwrought productions, a notion evidently shared by at least some members of Ruben Östlund’s jury, which awarded the film its namesake third runner-up prize, making this only the second honour Kaurismäki’s received from Cannes after winning the Grand Prix for The Man Without a Past in 2002. Billed as a belated fourth entry in the 66-year-old Finnish director’s “Proletariat Trilogy,” Fallen Leaves does re-engage the working-class woe and bittersweet ennui of Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and The Match Factory Girl (1990), but it otherwise operates in just about every conceivable way as any Kaurismäki…

Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema going. This contradiction of conditions deepens when the filmmaking takes place in a communist-governed nation like Vietnam, where capital operates (albeit sometimes uneasily) within a state-run system. And the contradiction deepens further when considering a Vietnamese filmmaker like Pham Thien An, whose developing body of work explores various levels of contemporary Vietnamese society—particularly the dramatic contrasts of city and country—as well as various states of non-belief and belief, especially (but not only) a deep devotion to Roman Catholicism. The polar pull between a modern yearning for things, technology, glitzy entertainments, sex,…

Feet in Water, Head on Fire debuted earlier this year at the True/False Film Festival and had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs this May in the Markers program. Although this is her first feature-length film as a director, Terra Long has been honing her craft over the past decade as a documentary editor (including editing this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project) and as the director of a number of well-received experimental shorts. A major part of her evolution as an artist has been her focus on researching plant-based film developers, exploring the materiality of film, and taking part in collaborative practice as a member of the Independent Imaging Retreat (affectionately known as The Film Farm, which I wrote about for this…

The sharpest gag in Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults, a dramedy about compulsive joke-tellers who do comedy routines to distract from their severe emotional dysfunction, might be the title, which prods at the childhood regression of three nominally adult siblings some years following the death of their parents. Disparate and aimless into their twenties and thirties, Eric (Michael Cera), Rachel (Hannah Gross), and Maggie (Sophia Lillis) aren’t coming of age so much as playacting the part of adults while recycling canned bits from their youth, self-soothing as they wait for someone more mature to tell them what to do. Though The Adults is at times diminished more than it’s enriched by its echoes of other texts about wayward children skulking back to their childhood home, as well as family narratives…

The act of adopting a new name ruptures the past and future, marking the reconstruction of personal mythology to make sense of our surroundings, particularly after seismic life events. In Past Lives, this attempt to introduce a new position in the world through linguistic transformation is undertaken by 12-year-old Na Young, who suddenly feels the ground shift beneath her feet when her film director father and artist mother prepare to emigrate from South Korea to Canada. Left behind will be a life in Seoul as an academically competitive child with a crush on her classmate Hae Sung, who recently outperformed the stubborn, pigtail-sporting protagonist on a math test. Soon, Na Young will become Nora—short for Lenore, a suggestion from her father. Though Nora (Greta Lee) spends her teenage years in…