Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 73 - Winter 2017 i Cinema Scope

Set on the fringes of Disney World, where an invisible underclass scrapes together its transient livings in decrepit motels, the latest film from Sean Baker further develops the talented writer-director’s interest in the everyday realities of marginalized communities—a welcome relief from the incessant navelgazing that predominates in the American indie-cinema landscape. Driven by a journalistic instinct that leads him beyond his own purview, Baker has made a series of films that tackle radically different subjects with a fusion of documentary-like authenticity and carefully constructed narratives. From the illegal Chinese immigrant of Take Out (2004) who is trying to pay off a debt through food delivery tips, to the street hustler from Ghana selling Gucci knockoffs in Prince of Broadway (2006); from the sub-bleached porn actress who befriends a lonely old…

In el pueblo, the 2016 survey of Latin American film and video assembled for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, curator Federico Windhausen notably included key works by foreign filmmakers that blurred positions of outsider vs. insider and what marks a film as “Latin American.” The two American selections, Bruce Baillie’s Valentin de las Sierras (1967) and Chick Strand’s Fake Fruit Factory (1986), are separated by nearly 20 years, but share locations (Mexico), themes (lives lived around and through labour), aesthetic approaches (each is shot with a preponderance of tight close-ups that fragment the bodies of their subjects), and a self-conscious awareness of both the codes and the pitfalls of ethnographic documentary, particularly the lingering and ideologically loaded romanticism of Americans travelling “south of the border” to a less developed land.…

“I am half feminist and half misogynist.”—Marco Ferreri (1928–1997) The 20th anniversary of Marco Ferreri’s death failed to elicit much attention, the exception being Anselma Dell’Olio’s valuable documentary, presented at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Marco Ferreri: Dangerous But Necessary. Eschewing biographical linearity, the documentary explores the prescient significance of Ferreri’s work rather than dwelling on personal anecdotes about his life, either personal or artistic. The documentary implicitly proves that Ferreri’s authorial mark was self-effacing, as his films are more prominent and memorable than the director himself. Yet Ferreri’s films remain unfit for celebratory sanctimony, too uncomfortably relevant to our current predicament to be canonized— and even prophetic, had this term not been abused to the point of insignificance. Almost 30 years before Spike Jonze made Her (2013), Ferreri cast…

How do you make a film without a cast or a cinematographer, a movie without a movie camera? The great Chinese conceptual artist Xu Bing has found a way that offers both unknown pleasures and uneasy challenges. Dragonfly Eyes is culled entirely from 14,000 hours of publicly available surveillance video that Xu and his studio collected from online sources over a three-year research period. Xu and his collaborators Zhai Yongming and Zhang Hanyi wrote a script, edited the footage to fit it, and hired actors to record dialogue. The result tells a story about a mad, on-the-run romance between Qingting, a Buddhist adept turned milkmaid turned internet celebrity, and her boyfriend Kevin. It’s also a documentary, at least on a moment-to-moment scale, since every clip (and there are around 1,400…

“It’s a cry echoed by a thousand sentinels An order relayed by a thousand heralds A beacon flaring up a thousand citadels A call to hunters lost in the great woods...”— Charles Baudelaire, “Les Phares” (1857) “A woman of fire makes no sense.”— Madame Hyde (Isabelle Huppert) In addition to often being quite funny, Serge Bozon’s fifth feature and second consecutive Isabelle Huppert vehicle is an exemplary film about pedagogy, perhaps one of the great ones about intuition, and also one of the strangest screen interpretations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s seminal 1886 science-fiction/horror tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The last is no small feat: at more than a hundred adaptations of the story made for film and television since the silent era, Jekyll/Hyde is the…

“I am not trying to make some new meaning from these films; I am striving to bring out the meanings that are there but obscured by the plot lines,” Thom Andersen writes of the method he employed for his film Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams (2015). Again and again, Andersen’s movies about movies—Red Hollywood (co-directed with Noël Burch, 1996), Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015)—repeat this action, like racking focus: suddenly drawing attention to something we had always seen onscreen but hadn’t paid attention to, excavating histories, geographies, and ideas we didn’t know we’d missed. Unsurprisingly, Slow Writing, the new collection of Andersen’s writings on cinema, is like his films: measured, political, a little bit ornery, striving to bring forward similarly…

Circles and squares: two evenly distributed shapes order and arrange the nontraditional continuity of Isiah Medina’s Idizwadidiz, one of the director’s first new works to screen publically since 88:88 (2015). The first of three shorts presented in the second edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Future// Present section—a program devoted primarily to features by emerging independent Canadian filmmakers—Idizwadidiz is the program’s ideal work: a film thinking through formal questions and developing potential methodologies to answer them. For seven nearly silent minutes of dense, kaleidoscopic rhythms —at least one, two, or three associations ahead of our cognitive faculties at all times—Idizwadidiz is cut to similarities of shape and colour: from a woman doodling circles to a graphic of a spinning globe, from a blank, blue iMessage to a nondescript body…

There’s a moment early in McDonagh’s new film that neatly encapsulates the playwrightturned- filmmaker’s competing instincts toward moral sophistication and childish self-indulgence. As the bereaved protagonist Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) struts through the local sign shop—the first step in her campaign to use the title’s eponymous placards to shame the local police department into finding the man who raped and murdered her daughter—the baby-faced proprietor Red (Caleb Landry Jones) hurriedly stashes away his copy of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Soon they’re discussing what Mildred can and can’t put on the billboards, finally agree- ing that she’s fine so long as she steers away from defamatory statements and words like “fuck, piss, or cunt”—a list to which Red can’t restrain himself from adding “anus.” It’s tough…

Blake Williams is a multi-dimensional character. A writer whose work has frequently graced the pages of this magazine, he is also an academic and a film artist. And, as a filmmaker, he has no time for flatness. No filmmaker since Ken Jacobs has been so consistently committed to exploring the aesthetic potentials of 3D technology. From earlier works such as Coorow-Latham Road (2011), which played with the gentle space-warping effects of Google Maps’ 360-degree cameras, to his suite of anaglyph films—Many a Swan (2012), Baby Blue (2013), Red Capriccio (2014), and Something Horizontal (2015)—the instability of screen space, and the points at which it encroaches into our own, has been one of Williams’ driving concerns. Leaving anaglyph behind in favour of polarized 3D technology, Williams has embarked on his first…

“The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence.”—Hélène Cixous, Love of the wolf To begin with a spoiler, Caniba concludes with a miracle—or at least this is how the film’s subject, the infamous Japanese cannibal Sagawa Issei, describes the sudden and unexpected wave of happiness that floods him as he is fed snacks and tucked in for a nap by a woman in a cosplay French maid’s outfit. As staged and performed for the cameras of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab stalwarts Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, this scene amounts to a distorted self-exculpation from a man who had been driven to commit murder by his urge to consume women’s flesh. Now disabled and more fearful of his own death…

“The .22 bullet tore a tiny hole into the canvas. The detonation was marginally louder than the crack of a whip. In the valley a crow protested. Luce emitted a short, husky laugh quite similar to the sound of the crow.” Thus begins Laissez bronzer les cadavres!, the first novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, the hilarious, hardboiled renovator of French crime literature whose work in (and about) literature and film I feted in Cinema Scope 62 on the unfortunate occasion of Pierre Morel’s 2015 “comeback” Manchette adaptation The Gunman. Co-written in 1971 with director Jean-Pierre Bastid after some of their film projects failed to get off the ground, and followed by nine slim, revolutionary Manchette novels over the next decade, Laissez bronzer les cadavres! has a tight, behaviourist style that may…

A modest work of considerable grace and insight, Ilian Metev’s 3/4 quietly stands as one of the most accomplished narrative debuts of the year. Genuinely compassionate, the 36-year-old Bulgarian’s directorial voice echoes forth confidently from the opening frames of this most understated of family dramas. Following the Semaine de la Critique feted documentary Sofia’s Last Ambulance (2012), Metev’s first narrative feature—winner of the Filmmakers of the Present prize at this summer’s Locarno Festival—begins with a deceptively intricate passage that simultaneously sets forth the film’s distinct formal strategy and its suggestive way with narrative. Through a series of slowly retreating, slightly offset, and downwardly tilted tracking shots, a peculiar schoolyard scenario swiftly takes shape: legs and feet jut out from the corner of each frame; a water bottle is kicked back…

The first thing to note about Samuel Maoz’s new film Foxtrot, Grand Jury Prize winner in Venice, is that it’s been eight years since the director somehow won Venice’s Golden Lion for his debut feature Lebanon (2009). That too was a co-production, with most of the nations listed above taking part in that earlier cinematic manoeuvre. (In the interim, the United Kingdom has dropped out of the Coalition of the Willing, replaced by Switzerland, customarily neutral in war but never in finance.) There are numerous thematic echoes between Lebanon and Foxtrot, despite the fact that, historically speaking, two different wars are being depicted. In Lebanon, a major plot point is the death of a soldier known only as Jonathan. In Foxtrot, the misreported death of a central character, Jonathan Feldman…

The first indication of The Wandering Soap Opera’s unclassifiable nature is the fact that it can’t even be pinned down to a single year. The film’s closing credits are divided into two neat sections, separating those who worked on it in 1990 from those who worked on it in 2017, with the former section directed by Raúl Ruiz and the latter by his widow Valeria Sarmiento. Ruiz originally shot the film during a six-day filmmaking and acting workshop in Santiago in 1990, but the resulting 16mm footage was subsequently lost and languished at Duke University. Once the footage was rediscovered, Sarmiento edited the material based on Ruiz’s original script, with the finished film premiering in Locarno this summer. Although its bipartite origins are not actually evident within the film itself,…

In a recent interview about Mindhunter, actor Hannah Gross noted that, “If [executive producer David Fincher] wasn’t there, he was very involved in what the episode would be like, and of course the overall tone, what it would look like. The other directors came in and used the container he made.” Holt McCallany, who plays FBI behavioural science expert Bill Tench opposite Jonathan Groff’s hostage-negotiator-turned-psycho-whisperer Holden Ford, also commented that when the production began there was a five-season “bible” mapping out trajectories for all the principal characters and narrative threads, which ultimately became completely irrelevant because Fincher almost entirely reworked the show’s format and structure. As the showrunner era of prestige TV now compels us to examine an entire season’s worth of Netflix episodes as the singular work of a…

SoCal being SoCal, it’s hard to leave it, especially if you were born there. The only good joke in Beatriz at Dinner has someone cracking wise about living in Newport Beach and the problem of going on vacation: Where do you go, since the best weather is here? People who don’t know the San Fernando Valley, birthplace (Studio City) and residence (Tarzana) of Paul Thomas Anderson, don’t appreciate how the subtext of Inherent Vice (2014) is the liberating relief of being at the beach, from which the Valley is separated by the giant wall of the Santa Monica Mountains. Even though the novel was a case of Thomas Pynchon returning to the scene of the crime—Manhattan Beach, where he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow—the movie was a case of Anderson getting out…

Barbet Schroeder’s The Venerable W. profiles Ashin Wirathu, a nationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar who has built his career targeting the county’s Rohingya minority. Schroeder charts Wirathu’s life from fringe extremist to superstar demagogue, trailing behind as he visits congregations and collects alms, detailing a series of campaigns which have been widely held responsible for the uptick in anti-Muslim furor compromising Myanmar’s democratic process. Well over a million refugees have entered neighbouring Bangladesh from the country’s western Rakhine State, 600,000 of them alone since August 2017; this past November, a shaky deal emerged whereby Myanmar agreed to “repatriate” the refugees, which, to human-rights activists, seems code for further internal encampment and/or being thrown back to hateful local governments. The ideology by which Theravada Buddhism—whose “good monks” were made icons of…

Two streams of Iranian film history flow into A Simple Event (1973). The first is the short-lived, pre-revolutionary “New Group” movement that sought to eschew the conventions of the commercial cinema of the time (after producing a few notable films, the group collapsed under pressure from censorial government forces). The second is the modernist “New Wave” familiar to those who followed the re-ascendance of Iranian cinema on the world stage in the ’90s—one that A Simple Event, with its cogent philosophical structure, creative use of non-actors, and unembellished mise en scene, clearly set the stage for. Its director, Sohrab Shahid Saless, was once a prominent filmmaker on the world scene, having won the Silver Bear in Berlin for his second film, Still Life, in 1974. Inspired by his success at…

The titular nape of the neck invoked in the word cocote is both a marked corporeal designation and an intimation of something bad about to happen. In Cocote, it represents the site of a beheading and the dreaded aura of imminent retribution. If hacer cogote translates as “to expect something,” then such anticipation is fraught with the ineluctable nature of violence as it relates specifically to Dominican life, which Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias carefully, if caustically, conjures with a near-palpable formal arsenal. The film opens to the bark of a sermon, presumably that of a Santo Domingo street preacher, summoning the tale of Diogenes in ancient Greece, who went looking for an honest man, just as the preacher now seeks someone who will love Jesus. The irony of…

That Guy Maddin’s feature-length follow-up to his most monumental work to date—the staggering mise en abyme of The Forbidden Room (2013)—would be The Green Fog, a 63-minute, found-footage video reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), is entirely apropos (and a rather Maddin-esque sleightof- hand) when one considers the fanfare with which The Green Fog was unveiled: as the closing-night event of the San Francisco International Film Festival’s 60th anniversary, with a score composed by Jacob Garchik and performed live by the Kronos Quartet. Certainly, when taken in the context of a decades-long career, the project is less immediately an impressive object. But at the same time, despite preconceptions of what such a project should normally be—a rhapsodic tribute to San Francisco, methodical archival exercise, or staid academic treatise—it’s not one…

“If there’s anyone who’s under the age of 16, would they please leave the theatre now,” a solemn voice, deep, with a country upbringing in its vowels, intones against a screen of black leader, “and return when they are over 16. It would be greatly appreciated then, because we are only in it”—suddenly rising to a scream—“FOR THE MONEY.” So began the retrospective selection of works by San Francisco-based artist Mike Henderson presented at this year’s Projections, the New York Film Festival’s experimental sidebar. And so too began his brief career in film: the two-minute Money was one of seven films Henderson directed in 1970, the year he completed his graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and found himself a 16mm camera at the urging of his friend,…

Located in the frigid climate of Canada’s Yukon, Dawson City was born virtually overnight when the discovery of gold in the region led to more than 100,000 would-be prospectors flooding into the area in the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1896, transforming a small settlement into a thriving boom town. While the population declined steeply following the end of the Gold Rush in 1899 (to south of 5,000 by 1902), its stillreasonable size and status as the territorial capital allowed it to remain a far-flung outpost of incipient 20th-century modernity— and thus a particularly distant site for the nascent practice of film exhibition. Dawson City was, effectively, the end of the filmdistribution line: films would arrive in town in many cases years after their initial releases, and, as by this…

Now that Blade Runner 2049 is officially a failure, its true life can begin. Indeed, only by becoming a catastrophe—according to The Hollywood Reporter, it will lose at least $80 million for its production company Alcon—could Denis Villeneuve’s film have any chance of being a credibly authentic successor to Sir Ridley Scott’s endlessly imitated 1982 landmark of neon-lit, rain-soaked future noir. One can only hope that the sequel’s commercial underperformance will necessitate a series of increasingly cynical efforts to fleece Blade Runner 2049’s admirers with a never-ending succession of alternate, director’s, and we-swear-to-God-it’s-the-final final cuts. Editor Joe Walker has spoken of the existence of a four-hour version—he’s yet to confirm the rumour that it merely comprised the 163-minute theatrical version and 75 minutes of scenes from Stalker (1979) inserted at…