Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 66 - Spring 2016 i Cinema Scope

“Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” —Susan Sontag Chicago-based artist Calum Walter has a gift for applying structure to tumult and disharmony. On the evidence of his videography to date—consisting of four shorts that have screened internationally at such avant-garde focal points as Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, and TIFF’s Wavelengths—it’s clear that Walter has a rooting interest in the human race’s symbiotic, often abrasive relationship with technology and the inevitable dysfunctions that arise from it. Exploring urban and natural landscapes fraught with chaotic potential, Walter posits a vision of impending catastrophes and failed technological mediations, highlighting the friction created when bodies, machines, and images are brought into close proximity—or violent collision.…

A sprawling, meticulously oiled machine, the Berlinale is many things, none of which will be discussed here—with an exception made for the films the author of this article watched. This year’s winner, Fire at Sea by Gianfranco Rosi, was a heaven-sent blessing to the whitewashing campaign Angela Merkel’s government is successfully conducting. After having driven a considerable portion of the Greek population below the poverty line, one of the five biggest arms exporters in the world is now dabbling in refugee-welcoming. Rosi’s film deals with this charitably fashionable topic also known as the “Refugee Crisis” (read: the violent displacement of innocent men and women by warmongering Western powers). Even more coincidental must have been Merkel’s meeting with the Clooneys to discuss exactly how generous and kind we should be with…

At this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, one of the three directors who received tributes was mostly ignored. Adachi Masao and Pere Portabella were in the spotlight with much-anticipated premieres, while the first international retrospective of Claudio Caligari’s work remained in the shadows—an appropriate fate, as the margin was both Caligari’s subject and position throughout his career. The Italian director passed away at the age of 67 in May last year, only months before Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad, 2015), his lowlife buddy movie, was shown out of competition in Venice. There exists virtually no writing on Caligari or his work in English, including obituaries. A new print of his 1983 debut Amore tossico (Toxic Love) and subtitles were made for the Rotterdam screening. Taken by the revelatory power…

There’s no denying that we should be grateful to the fox in Antichrist (2009) for providing the best catchphrase to ever emerge from a Lars von Trier movie. Yet Robert Eggers’ debut feature is more cunning when it comes to using flora and fauna to amplify the atmosphere of unease that suffuses his story of a 17th-century New England family imperilled by internal tensions and very old-school forces of fiendish wickedness. His creatures work just as hard as Antichrist’s furry friends to ensure that, indeed, chaos reigns, though the director’s presentation of his animal cast members avoids the kind of overt anthropomorphism that inevitably evokes memories of Tales of the Riverbank. Then again, something as flagrant as a talking fox—or, for that matter, genital self-mutilation— would be out of step…

Tom Palazzolo loves a parade. The tramping of feet, a drum’s martial beat, the waving of flags, the decorative floats, the endless processions of just plain folks—the veteran Chicago filmmaker and teacher’s films have been driven by parade and pageantry and the everyday people his camera has seen and loved for most of his career. Some call him Chicago’s bestknown filmmaker, but there’s nothing especially high-profile about Palazzolo’s reputation beyond the Windy City, so if you’re new to his filmmaking, you’re forgiven, and you’re in for some very good stuff. Take Palazzolo’s 1970 Love It / Leave It— one of the high points in Flicker Alley’s Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film 1920-1970 DVD/Bluray combo released last fall—for starters. A 14-minute almanac of Midwestern America and its funky Americana at…

“I should rewatch The Man Who Fell to Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and All the President’s Men.” —Laura Poitras, “Berlin Journal,” February 7, 2013 “For those who listen, the stars are singing.” —Edward Snowden Just after making it though Astro Noise, Laura Poitras’ new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (whose catalogue is the source for both quotes above), the friend I was with told me I should really check out the floor below us, which housed some of the permanent collection. He’s a long-time New Yorker, a film editor whose fine sense of his craft is informed by decades of taking in all the city has to offer in terms of visual art and cinema. So naturally, I obeyed, and after rounding just one corner, Joseph…

In the waning days of 2015, public intellectuals as varied as Salman Rushdie, Bill Maher, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar floated (or sky-hooked) the notion that Donald Trump was a “Manchurian Candidate,” despite the fact that none of them—or the many, many pundits and think-piece artists mining the same vein of pop-culture reference—could agree exactly how the putative Republican frontrunner fulfilled that role. While the concept of Trump as a Democratic mole planted to divide and conquer the GOP, thus paving the way for a Clinton Presidency 2.0, was comically satisfying, the alternate hot take—that The Donald’s vociferous anti-Islamist rhetoric functioned dually as a recruiting tool for ISIS—became harder to laugh off as his public appearances incited greater and greater furor. The words of one Eleanor Iselin come to mind: “Rallying a…

Two heavily pulled quotes from Sundance 2016’s opening press conference, both spilled from the mouth of the festival’s founder and director Robert Redford—“I’m not into the Oscars,” and later, when asked what he was most looking forward to at this year’s edition, “The wrap party”—were endearingly and unexpectedly cleareyed enough (considering the source) that, as I trekked over to Park City for the second consecutive January, I felt my guard lowering, strangely moved by these perhaps inadvertently cynical gestures. Considering some of the other arch responses Redford gave to the roomful of journalists, it appeared as though the Sundance Kid himself was running out of fucks to give. And who can blame him? The man turns 80 this year—he couldn’t have more than five of these left in him—and the…

Love’s reach does not to everything extend, for it cannot shake or break the stab of Death. Yet little can Death take if in a loving heart the fear of it subsides. Nor can Death much take at all, for it cannot drive its fear into the heart where Love resides. That if Death rule over Life, Love over Death. —Macedonio Fernández, “I believed” Over more than 60 years, Jacques Rivette was credited for “mise en scene” on his films. While his rejection of the terms “réalisation” or “direction” may have derived from a historical imperative to keep the flame of the politique des auteurs burning, it may also point towards an essential predisposition of this most evasive member of the nouvelle vague. The concept of mise en scene emphasizes…

One of the funniest scenes in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar!—the brothers’ typically hectic, crowded, and colourful return to the studio-era Hollywood scene they last evoked in Barton Fink (1991)—depicts debonair English director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) attempting to guide cowboy actor Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) through a line reading. Pulled off the set of one of his standard-issue westerns and reassigned to a drawing-room melodrama after the studio decides to change his image, Hobie now finds himself imprisoned in the stifling tux of a spurned lover while Laurentz tries to shape his Midwestern drawl into something closer to the director’s own velvet British purrs. They quickly abandon the “mirthless chuckle” the filmmaker initially requested, but the line—Doyle’s character has to rebuff another woman’s comforts with a “rueful” reading…

The talking-head documentary, anathema to the more purposive (i.e., “show, don’t tell”) modes of nonfiction filmmaking, is revived with stubborn, prolix determination by the brood of Etruscan elders who preside over the unassuming habitat of Il Solengo. An award winner at last year’s Docslisboa, the film traces the speculative and spectral existence of one Mario de Marcella (the “de” being critical here), who is said to have lived a recalcitrant, hermetic life within a forested cave in Tuscia, as withdrawn from the pack as the film’s eponymous male boar. Il Solengo’s narrative is literally hinged to oral tradition, emanating from the yarns unspooled by these aged hunters: the richness of the world is gleaned from a fixed stance of wine glass in hand, sauce simmering on the stove, logs blazing…

“I’d introduce myself, but I don’t know me either.” — Jerry Lewis, The Patsy (1964) Jerry Lewis is 90 years old. He’s spent, at least by his own count, 85 of those years entertaining audiences in one form or another—debuting on stage at age five, miming along with records in hotel shows as a kid, emceeing for acts on the Borscht Belt as a teenager. Lewis signed the contract to make his first picture, My Friend Irma, with Dean Martin, 68 years ago. He met Dean at least three years before that. Their fifth collaboration, Sailor Beware (1952), was seen by more than 80 million people worldwide. He wrote, produced, directed, and starred in 13 of his own films from 1960-1983. The first, The Bellboy (1960), Lewis shot and edited…

Margaret Honda’s sudden emergence, nearly 30 years into her artistic career and two decades on from her first museum show (Recto Verso at Los Angeles MOCA), as a deeply intriguing new figure in filmmaking is anomalous in several ways. Her two films, Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (2014) and Color Correction (2015), in their contented commitment to working through a single idea, can play like relics from the high times of the American avant-garde cinema, the years of minimalism giving way to conceptualism. This throwback quality can be found as well in Honda’s firm insistence on the traditional 35mm- or 70mm-equipped theatre as the work’s only home. At a time when even Nathaniel Dorsky is hanging digital prints on Manhattan’s walls, Honda’s gesture is as significant as it is constricting. While this…

“Jason makes everything better.” —Paul Feig, quoted in Esquire’s 2015 Statham cover story It’s difficult to think we that we should be grateful to Guy Ritchie for anything, but I guess he deserves credit for casting Jason Statham in his debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Statham has since gone on to become the most reliable and formidable exemplar of the postmodern action film. Has this millennium brought us another movie star outside of Asia qualifying as an international icon in this field? The big blockbusters come with their own set of rules and digital overkill—last year’s Furious 7, in which Statham easily excels as a menacing opponent, is a good example—so by sticking mostly to mid-level genre productions Statham may be the final heir to a long…

For the past few years, Ted Fendt has been one of the busiest under-the-radar figures in film exhibition in New York: a projectionist at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he is also the city’s go-to live-subtitler of rare, unsubtitled prints of French films, and ranks among its most active moviegoers. But his contributions to film culture extend beyond the local scene to the online sphere, where he has become an essential translator of texts by Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-André Fieschi, among others. He has also produced new English subtitles for a number of films by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet (having taught himself German in order to so) and co-edited the catalogue for an upcoming retrospective of their films to tour the US later in…

As was made clear by the success of Room 237 (2012)—Rodney Ascher’s exploration of the varied and profoundly detailed interpretations of The Shining (1980)—Kubrickology remains a popular pastime for critics and audiences alike. The numerous, exhaustively detailed accounts of Kubrick’s work and working methods seem to have only added to the aura of mystery that swirls around the director, and inspired later filmmakers to flights of biographical fancy. Indeed, one of the central “what-if” scenarios posited by Room 237—that Kubrick made The Shining as a cryptic apologia for his role in faking the Apollo 11 moon landing—served as the basis for an entire feature ten years prior to Ascher’s film. Produced for French television, William Karel’s 2002 Opération lune (better known by its English title, Dark Side of the Moon)…

L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) is an enduring, mesmerizing modernist masterpiece. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this Resnais/Robbe-Grillet collaboration—apart from its dapper design (including trimmed topiary) and Delphine Seyrig’s divinely breathy intonations and Chanel plumage—is its constant creation of spatial and temporal ambiguity, its perverse usurping of causal relationships between events and people, equivocating as uncertainty in the mind of the viewer. The film’s deeply enigmatic and somewhat musical narrative structure invokes partition-like perception play, and swiftly exposes the wall separating fiction and reality as porous and easily retractable. That the film still divides today, its status as masterwork intact and unequivocal on the one side and its charges of academicism, pretension, and downright boringness on the other, suggests the obvious: intellectualism in art remains an easy target, especially…

Anti-colonial polemics don’t get much more flattering to Western audiences than Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, which is at once an aesthetically atypical Oscar nominee for its languid pace and circular plotting, and an all-too-typical contemporary arthouse darling that weakly elegizes lost cultures to solemn applause. Working from the diaries of two explorers in search of a redemptive jungle plant, Guerra mounts a strangely muted corrective to the images of the Amazon that have long proliferated in the white textual imaginary. Though armed with a righteous mandate to critique his source texts, Guerra proves a little too enchanted with the photogenic textures of the Colombian Amazon to keep from indulging in his own lyrical blackand-white exploration of its thick foliage and rippling waters. The result is a muddled narrative…