Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 70 - Spring 2017 i Cinema Scope

How can a filmmaker like Feng Xiaogang exist in China? His films somehow manage to be both widely popular and ideologically unconventional. For many years—until the onset of the current “wild east” phenomenon, in which a stream of record-breaking blockbusters seems regularly to be emerging from China’s hyped-up movie-production machine—Feng has consistently been one of the top box-office earners. At the same time, his films accomplish interesting cultural work, as they speak in a popular social voice, one pitched with a unique mixture of sarcasm and cynicism. His latest, I Am Not Madame Bovary, whose revised version screened at the Berlinale’s Critics’ Week, puts both poles of Feng’s cinema in heightened relief. The Beijing-born Feng’s 16 features have established him as China’s premier homegrown comedy blockbuster craftsman. The Feng Xiaogang…

“He knows how to pace a story. He isn’t a great novelist. He’s a craftsman, but every once in a while it’s nice to read something long without boring us to death before we get to page 50.” —Roberto Bolano on Thomas Harris’ Hannibal There’s a shootout at the end of Live by Night, Ben Affleck’s vainglorious adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s 2012 Prohibition-era novel, which embodies both the virtues and vices of Affleck’s direction and Lehane’s source material. Joe Coughlin, Affleck’s doughy outlaw-for-hire, has come to an opulent Tampa hotel to confront the Boston-based Italian Mafioso for whom he’s created a tropical empire, and who has decided to prematurely terminate their contract. Affleck’s crew infiltrates the premises from below, streaming out of the rum-running tunnels that burrow through the city,…

The psychedelic road-movie crime comedy Contact High (2009) is Michael Glawogger’s most far-out film in an exceptionally flexible filmography, one that boasts fiction, documentary, and a clutch of too-rarely-seen experimental shorts. A contact high was also what one commonly experienced in Glawogger’s presence: his mischievous high-on-life energy was infectious and irresistible, his playful provocateur nature occasioning charm rather than outrage. His filmmaking was a gutsy, immersive study in extremis: he consistently pushed limits and challenged mainstream biases, explored new filmic forms and languages, zigzagged the world, and wandered into territory many would avoid at all costs, excavating startling human beauty and tenacious dignity amidst the most unexpected, disavowed, overlooked, and taboo subjects. All of his films are far out, in a sense. His fiction films needle at capacious, twisted, even…

Sundance 2017 was a festival to remember, but not for its programming. With blizzards raging daily and Uber prices surging to impossible heights, shuttle buses filled to the brim with frozen Sundancers clotted already hampered roadways, causing excessive transportation delays and roadway mayhem—as did a non-festival-sanctioned, celebrity- led Women’s March. A mysterious cyber attack, which shut down all ticket sales on the festival’s busiest day, added to the mayhem, and coincided with power outages that led to the cancellation of whole slates of screenings at one particular venue. No down-filled, fox-furtrimmed designer coat or top-shelf snow boot could combat the frigid temperatures, and by Day 6, the Sundance plague hit press and public screenings alike, with echoes of deeply concerning coughs resounding throughout theatres. Most notably, the festival coincided with…

It’s all in the wrist. Buried beneath layers of latex as John Merrick in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), the only part of John Hurt that is visibly untouched by disfiguring makeup is his left arm, which the actor wields with the precision and grace of a sabre. It’s both an historical fact and an artistic necessity that this version of Merrick should be supremely uncomfortable in his own bulbous skin, and Hurt makes the ingenious choice to style his arm as an extension of his character’s humane intelligence—as if this slender, shapely limb, with its expressively flitting fingers, was trying to escape the rest of his body. The impression at all times is of a man reaching out, whether to ward off a horde of gawking onlookers at…

Silence is Martin Scorsese’s best film in 20 years—since Kundun (1997), in fact, which also happens to be the last of his films to focus primarily on matters spiritual. In claiming this, I have no desire to put forth a return-to-form narrative to counter that of the Scorsese acolytes, for whom the man has made nothing but masterpieces or near-to for that same span of years. If I think (and I do) that every fiction feature Scorsese has directed from Bringing Out the Dead (1999) to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)—with the oddboy- out that is Hugo (2011)—has been varying degrees of garish pulp, that doesn’t mean that a one-off return to the well of the Serious would, of necessity, revitalize his talents. Rather, what Silence gives enormously satisfying…

There are several ways to measure the greatness of Dane Komljen’s first feature work, All the Cities of the North, and one of them is simply asking people who’ve just seen it if they can compare it to anything else. I’ve played this little game with viewers, many asked randomly, after festival screenings. So far, the best try came from an Argentine friend who tried to link it with Sokurov, but then, after about a minute, gave up and said, “No, not even Sokurov.” As cinema viewers and as humans, we’re wired to compare one thing against another, and when a work of art defies this natural process, the responses can be interesting. I’ve heard the extremes of utter hatred and mad passion for All the Cities of the North,…

Early in Hugh Gibson’s The Stairs, we meet Marty, a recovering addict working as a social worker for drug users in Toronto’s Regent Park. A loquacious eccentric who clearly relishes the Aaron Sorkininflected walk-and-talk of his onscreen introduction, Marty seems equally comfortable leading a tutorial on packing safe injection kits at work and watching Bonanza on a hard-won recliner at home. As he brings Gibson in to the antiseptic stairwell of the Regent Park Community Health Centre, where he currently works and used to use, Marty asks the filmmaker to look at their surroundings through his eyes. “Sit down in my living room. You could seat the whole family there comfortably,” he jokes, gesturing to the landing— at once ironically highlighting the dire situations of the centre’s clients, and making…

The rickety car carrying the three Soviet filmmakers Eduard Tisse, Grigori Alexandrov, and Sergei Eisenstein arrived at the border town of Laredo on February 13th, 1932, having travelled the 800 miles from Mexico City in two days. What was imagined as a brief stop on their return trip to Hollywood—where they hoped to reclaim the thousands of feet of footage that their American benefactors, Mary Sinclair and her husband, the socialist author Upton Sinclair, were holding hostage, the result of various disagreements and delays, overruns of budget, and failures of communication—became a month-long ordeal: their visas rejected, their politics questioned, their motives suspected, they could do little but wait while enduring, in the words of Eisenstein’s biographer Marie Seton, “heaped indignities” at the hands of the American authorities. When a…

At a Q&A after a well-received screening of Eliza Hittman’s film Beach Rats, which earned her the Directing Award in the US Dramatic competition, the Cal Arts grad spoke of the aesthetic need to “de-emphasize story—an admission that, in the context of Sundance’s high priority for narrative takeaways, might well have constituted blasphemy. Notionally a film about boys idling a summer away in South Brooklyn, the film is anything but idle in its restless portrayal of one particular beach rat’s personal crisis, a coming-of-consciousness tale in which the doe-faced but sinewy Frankie (star-in-the-making Harris Dickinson) can’t escape his increasing attraction to other men while maintaining a façade of hetero-normativity. As far as story goes, such an implicitly tensile construct is ripe for mining, not only in the immediate afterglow of…

Here’s the scene that I’m going to describe to introduce this appraisal of the new Viceland TV series Nirvanna the Band the Show. The scene starts with Matt Johnson already talking as he sits down at a Mandarin buffet restaurant, one of the quintessentially Torontonian locations the show likes to use (“to infiltrate” is more accurate, given the production’s aversion to permissions and permits). Jay McCarrol has something important to tell him, but Matt doesn’t give him the chance. Instead, Matt wants to quote a line by Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata (1978), which he was just watching before leaving to come here to enjoy a Canada Day lunch with his best and seemingly only friend. It probably wasn’t the first time Matt had seen it, given his extensive knowledge…

One of the best sketches on Key and Peele is “Hoodie,” a wordless one-minute bit that finds Jordan Peele walking through a prosperous suburban neighbourhood, encountering a series of withering and suspicious looks from the white residents. After noticing a cop cruising the block in his squad car, Peele flips up his hoodie to reveal a painting of a young white male in side profile, and walks away unscathed. The evocation of the shooting of Trayvon Martin is intentionally blunt, but the sketch’s subtext is sharply double-edged. Beyond puncturing the skin-deep psychology of racial profiling, “Hoodie” suggests the disturbing possibility that camouflage is the best defense mechanism in a country where black bodies are still stigmatized—blend in, or else. Peele’s widely acclaimed feature-film directing debut Get Out can be read…

As the premise and practice of visual anthropology instills itself within both academia and the contemporary art world, the vast mantle of visual culture seems primed for its next official designation, with visual geography a leading contender. In recent years, a blossoming body of works have built upon the experimental and documentary tradition of landscape films (including progenitors Keiller, Akerman, and Benning) to critically (re-)assess the operations informing and shaping any given space. Films like Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016), and Peter Bo Rappmund’s 2015 Topophilia (which Michael Sicinski discussed in Cinema Scope 64) have reinvigorated the form to introduce broader questions of political economy and the prison-industrial complex, colonial narratives, and national borders. One topic that has been little broached…

The first thing you should know about El Mar la mar is that it is not a production of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. The new film, which premiered in Berlin’s Forum and won the Caligari Prize, was made by SEL regular J.P. Sniadecki and Canadian-born, Ithaca, NY-based experimentalist Joshua Bonnetta. Yet it’s an independent collaboration, and while this may seem like unnecessary hair-splitting, it does make a difference, not only for taxonomic purposes but also in the final product. While there are significant differences between the filmmakers associated with the SEL, there is a tendency to perceive them as products of a “house style,” much in the same way that critics have discerned similarities between Borderline Films productions (Afterschool, 2006; Martha Marcy May Marlene, 2011; James White, 2015)—a general…

“All the things she does, written in her diary But when the day is done, she cannot tell the truth.” — Talulah Gosh, in “Talulah Gosh” In the pages leading up to Roland Barthes’ generous, accurate, and still vital conception of our relationship to photographic images in Camera Lucida, he devotes a fair amount of space to writing about the discomfort he’d always felt as a spectator forced to judge images through two languages: one critical, the other expressive. In most senses, this uneasiness spoke to a fundamental and paradoxical problem that long characterized Modernism—namely, that it was a tendency balanced on the tension between its stark obscurantism and its self-conscious intellectualism— and this is partly what drove Susan Sontag, in the mid-’60s, to try to annihilate once and for…

Arriving like a breath of fresh air five days into the 67th Berlinale, Thomas Arslan’s Bright Nights salvaged what was by all accounts was another typically lacklustre Competition lineup. Perhaps it was the film’s crisp Nordic setting and perpetually sunny exteriors, but Arslan’s latest, with its unassuming setup and undemonstrative tenor, felt, if nothing else, directed by a consummate artist unafraid to let the work speak for itself. Starring Georg Friedrich (surprise winner of the festival’s Best Actor prize) as Michael, a divorcé who after the death of his father attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage son (Tristan Göbel), Bright Nights finds Arslan continuing to move away from the austere urban genre scenarios he and his Berlin School affiliates built their reputations on towards more ambiguous, existentially inclined narratives…

Long before he laid the foundations of an Inuit cinema (and picked up a Caméra d’Or in the bargain), a then 12-year-old Zacharias Kunuk used to sell handmade sculptures to his teachers to scrape together admission for 16mm film screenings held in an Igloolik community hall. It was here that Kunuk was introduced to John Wayne, whom he quickly came to idolize—a childhood worship that dissipated as the future filmmaker was increasingly confronted with the Hollywood Western’s relentless denigration of the American Indian, who rarely escaped the standard roles of a jester, a burden, or a threat. All three stereotypes get a workout in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which Wayne’s intractable, racist anti-hero Ethan Edwards and his half-breed “nephew” Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) embark on a five-year quest…