Innehållsförteckning för Issue 91- Summer 2022 från Cinema Scope

Writing in 1971, Vivian Gornick described the US women’s movement as “a declaration of independence against the false description of the self.” Although articulated in a different place and time, the phrase has a distinct resonance with the documentary films Helke Misselwitz made in East Germany in the ’80s—an essential body of work now enjoying a renewed international circulation, with recent retrospectives at New York’s Anthology Film Archives and Spain’s Play-Doc festival, and as part of the four-woman program “Films d’Allemagne(s), 1978–2020” at the Goethe-Institut in Paris. As the German Democratic Republic ambled into its twilight years, Misselwitz filmed everyday people at work and at home, gave women and girls the chance to tell their own stories, and captured the textures of a country that would soon cease to exist.…

Let me tell you about a few movies I saw in the summer of 2000, when I was 11 years old, that would become vitally important to my budding cinephilia. One was Godzilla 2000, the first Japanese Godzilla movie to reach Western theatres since 1985, and a movie I feverishly anticipated. I was a devoted fan of Japanese giant-monster movies at the time, but I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t yet wise enough to appreciate them for the right reasons. At the time, I had only three categories for understanding movies: “good,” “bad,” and “so bad it’s good.” Godzilla and his kaiju friends fell in the latter category. I mean, that’s obviously not a monster, that’s a man in a rubber suit! Do the people who made these movies…

“I’m telling you I was in deep, we both were, it was a honeymoon, that whirligig of crashing nuances and dismal reconciliations, vistas of hope redeemed, endless milliseconds free of natural law.”—Denis Johnson, The Stars at Noon After waiting 34 years to return to the Cannes Competition, Claire Denis deserved a warm welcome back. Instead, she got to be the chosen victim of the Brown Bunny Syndrome, the annually recurring compulsion among festival attendees to proclaim a film as the worst ever to compete for the Palme d’Or. Although she received some vindication from the jury, who awarded her the Grand Prix (ex aequo, but still…), the critical vitriol is baffling. Stars at Noon may not be top-tier Denis but it’s also far from a trainwreck and, to be sure,…

João Pedro Rodrigues has always made shifting between disparate registers and genres appear like the most natural thing in the world, and his self-declared musical fantasy Will-o’-the-Wisp is another case in point. If the sort of musical numbers and transgressive flights of fancy already familiar from the rest of the veteran Portuguese director’s oeuvre are thus ready and accounted for, his slim yet surreptitiously substantial sixth feature adds some new genres to the mix to exhilarating effect. Apart from the science-fiction stylings of the film’s framing device, which exude a droll, lo-fi charm of their own, the true innovation here is comedy, which works like a charm, dovetailing with Rodrigues’ trademark eroticism to amusingly ribald effect while also giving structure to his free-floating approach to narrative. And, like in all…

Many years ago, I sat down for a festival screening of an Iranian film next to another local Toronto critic whose pugnacious reputation preceded him. Unsolicited and not-so-rhetorically, he asked me if the long scenes of rural driving native to so many of that country’s art-house exports were—and here I am quoting from memory—somehow equivalent to the action scenes in Hollywood releases. It wasn’t a serious question, of course, just a bit of sarcastic saber-rattling before the lights went down. But it’s stayed with me, partially because it was one of the last times I spoke to the critic in question, and partially because it’s a good way into the relationship between national cinemas and their various archetypes and clichés—as well as the clichés writers bring to and impose so…

In his first feature, The Plains, David Easteal nestles his camera into the backseat of a Hyundai sedan belonging to Andrew (Andrew Rakowski), a lawyer in his late fifties. As he commutes home from a sleepy office park on the outskirts of Melbourne, he whizzes by suburban strip malls and inches through traffic jams, then merges onto the freeway alongside dozens of other drivers. All the while, the camera is aimed toward the windshield, which compartmentalizes the movement of the outside world into the top half of the screen. As The Plains proceeds to collage together fragments from a year of Andrew’s commutes, his car comes to function like a cocoon. At first, the vehicle seals him inside of a comforting routine, but above the drab buildings and roads—and occupying…

The experimental filmmakers known as Colectivo los ingrávidos came together in Tehuacán, Mexico in 2012, adopting their name—which translates into English as “the weightless”—from the title of the first novel of Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, a work that examines acts of translation playing out in three parallel lives against a backdrop of Spanish-language literary culture in North America. Inspired by Luiselli’s themes of translation, displacement, and the imaginative reconstruction of identity, los ingrávidos posed a challenge to the repressive ideology so often articulated in mainstream cinema through the pursuit of an alternative, radical grammar of poetic filmmaking. Their approach is one that contests cultural officialdom, cherishes ecstatic communions with the natural world, and tethers aesthetic experience to social support and free will, utilizing a diversity of forms and processes—from diaristic…

The 75th anniversary celebration of Cannes was very much a “celebration of cinema,” a my-God-it’s-full-of-stars-studded affair intended as a show of power that, rightly, would make any other such movie-based event jealous. As witnessed by its anniversary trailer, which added (seemingly via Photoshop) the names of Cannes-branded auteurs like Federico Fellini, Xavier Dolan, and Maïwenn to the famed red steps as they ascend toward the heavens to Le carnaval des animaux, Cannes waved its big balls high in the air, proving that they are able to attract seemingly anyone in the film world it wanted (except for David Lynch), and have the money to fly them in for a couple of nights, show their faces and pose for pictures on the red carpet wearing sponsored designer garments and gems, and…

When Jerzy Skolimowski cancelled his press commitments at Cannes to promote his new feature, EO, he denied critics and cinephiles an explanation behind the festival’s most mystifying entry. All but engineered to prompt bemusement, the film, a bold, modernday reimagining of Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), is one whose mysteries are in fact part and parcel of its allure. Indeed, to hear Skolimowski comment on its making or meaning might break the film’s carefully calibrated spell. Few seem more aware of this than the 84-year-old Polish director himself, who did eventually appear at the festival’s closing ceremony to accept the Jury Prize (an award shared with Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, co-directors of The Eight Mountains). But in keeping with his wily nature, Skolimowski used the opportunity not to…

For all of his evident flaws as an artist, Alex Garland is one of the few filmmakers in the world who is genuinely concerned with science and its methods. One of cinema’s great paradoxes is how a medium so dependent on science and technology is also so reliably hostile toward both. Garland—whose production company name is DNA Films—isn’t hostile; rather, he’s concerned about what science can deliver to humanity and the earth. He approaches the subject from a science-fact basis, surely influenced by a family legacy that includes Nobel laureate biologist Sir Peter Medawar, the so-called father of transplantation. Put another way, while most in his line of work worship at the altars of H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, and Frank Herbert, Garland is an Arthur C. Clarke man all…

Ordinarily when one is tasked to compose an obituary for a public figure, the writer can assume that the reader has some basic familiarity with the subject. This lends itself to a particular approach, which usually entails an expression of the subject’s significance to his or her field, some historical context for their achievements, and an overall reminder of the enduring value of their work. In the case of experimental filmmaker Jim Jennings, who died on May 19th, some of these assumptions are frustratingly inapplicable. Even within the rarefied world of avant-garde film, Jennings’ work still has not received the exposure and acclaim it deserves. This should change since, through the efforts of his wife Karen Treanor, a team of young archivists, and Mark Toscano of AMPAS, Jennings’ work is…

Eager to celebrate a theatrical box-office win, Variety recently praised the success of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s equally moving and galling Everything Everywhere All at Once, chirping that its broad appeal beyond arthouse crowds attests not only to adult audiences’ willingness to return to theatres for the right sort of movie, but also to the fact that “ticket buyers really love the concept of a multiverse.” Dubious as Variety’s audience-polling methodology might be, its characterization of the film as a timely non-Marvel alternative to multiverse mania captures something of the so-called Daniels’ preternatural savviness at branding. The former music video directors—who first branched into features with Swiss Army Man (2016), an absurdist drama about a suicidal man whose life is redeemed by a farting corpse—have already shown an enviable…

“I feel a great affinity with Poe; I understand his pain.” —Dario Argento, interviewed by Maitland McDonagh The first shot is a panoramic view of Rome on a bright summer day. It seems unusually quiet as we swerve along mostly depopulated streets looking through the windscreen of a car. The gliding movements produce a slightly otherworldly feel, enhanced by the floating sounds of Arnaud Rebotini’s electronic music. A shot looking up at houses, sky, and treetops warps our perception with a split-screen effect, and part of the image shows views from an alternate angle, as if two images coming from different directions had aligned themselves magically on the same pane of glass. Counter-shots show the person whose point of view we are sharing: a female driver (Ilenia Pastorelli) looking out,…

The brightest light in the Chinese independent cinema world at this moment is Beijing-based filmmaker and artist Qiu Jiongjiong. In an atmosphere of increasing surveillance and control of non-official, unauthorized artistic activity in China, Qiu, now 44, stands out as an artist with a powerful, complex, engaging vision who has found a way to continue to work without compromise. His new film, A New Old Play, premiered at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival and is now having a series of screenings in North America, following its pickup by Icarus Films via their dGenerate Films Collection. Qiu grew up steeped in the backstage atmosphere of traditional Chinese theatre, and most of his works remain infused with the sounds and sights he absorbed there. He first achieved domestic fame among art collectors,…

The aphorism “eat the rich,” long attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has found a contemporary home in popular media. Whether TikTok teens making snappy, meme-laden upper-class critiques in under a minute (now competing for Cannes awards themselves) or established filmmakers navigating narratives of wealth and privilege in Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning features like Parasite (2019), targeting the better-off at present has a deep-seated sense of satisfaction, for obvious reasons. There was a feeling soon after the Cannes premiere of Triangle of Sadness, Swedish satirist Ruben Östlund’s latest “eat the rich” parable, that it could be a serious contender for the Palme given that, once again, it gave the jury a chance to lean hard into such schadenfreude. Never mind the already clear us-versus-them nature of the Cannes jury, made up of…

“The first step in cinematographic thought seems to me to be the utilisation of existing objects and forms which can be made to mean everything, because nature is profoundly, infinitely versatile.” —Antonin Artaud, “Cinema and Abstraction” It’s been ten years since Sensory Ethnography Lab cine-anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel made a quite literal splash at the 2012 Locarno Festival with their first feature-length collaboration, Leviathan, which still stands as arguably the single most impactful advancement in film language this century. “Here is a true 21st-century ethnography,” wrote Phil Coldiron in these pages, “cutting through the stories and forcing us to reconsider our mode of engaging with all that is not ourselves.” Their latest work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica—a film inspired by Andreas Vesalius’ like-named books on human anatomy (its…

“I just did the ‘tell’ part, hoping they’d imagine the ‘show’ part.” That’s Stan, the child protagonist of Richard Linklater’s latest animated feature, Apollo 10½, speaking to his mother about a class presentation he botched. But the statement could equally double as a credo of Linklater himself, whose films often violate the maxim that one ought to “show, don’t tell.” In Linklater’s best works, the constant stream of dialogue does not just articulate the actions and reactions of characters, the minor intrigues and quibbles that connect one person with another, but an entire process of sociability that is external to, yet manifests itself in, the exchanges between individuals. Take Slacker (1990) for example. The film presents a kind of elaborate game of telephone, where one character comes into contact with…

Ever since making his Sundance debut with The Witch (2015), Robert Eggers has been eyed as a potential breakout from his class of millennial name-brand auteurs. There’s a long history of horror movies making a splash at that festival—going back to another Witch (Project) at the turn of the century—but this austere portrait of 17th-century New England suggested that Eggers was chasing something different. An essay by Lauren Wilford for Bright Wall/Dark Room in 2017 argued for The Witch as “[a] polyphonic work…it can be difficult to suss out the author’s own view among the many sensitively rendered perspectives.” Locating the film’s influences in painters like Friedrich, Goya, and Vermeer, Wilford further predicted that Eggers might one day live up to the standard of his professed cinephilic inspirations, Ingmar Bergman…