Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 67 - Summer 2016 i Cinema Scope

I have always thought of Pere Portabella as the most French filmmaker outside of France—though “French” in the specific sense of the long-standing Gallic idealization of l’artiste engagé. The summit of this ideal, in cinematic terms, would most likely be the Godard of the late ’60s and early ’70s, i.e., the Godard of Godard-Gorin and Godard-Miéville, moving easily between short, medium-and feature-length films and wedding formal innovation to radical politics. Yet even the most sympathetic of observers (amongst whom I count myself) at some point faces the difficulty of explaining how this kind of politicized art relates to actual political change. Godard’s leftism is certainly key to the work, but it’s not as if the maker(s) of Struggles in Italy (1969), Vent d’est (1970), or Ici et ailleurs (1974) went…

When, after 16 shots and nearly 20 minutes, the camera first moves in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Antigone, it punctuates a guard’s nervous announcement to the Theban king Kreon of this mythic story’s inciting incident: Antigone’s burial of her brother Polyneikes, executed and left to rot in the open as a final reprimand for deserting the doomed assault on Argos. Though we, the viewers, are aware from the beginning of Antigone’s responsibility, neither the king nor the city elders (four men doubling as the film’s chorus) are, prompting one of the latter to ask, “O Kreon, son of Menokeus, can it be that something holy has happened here?” As he delivers his question, the camera marks a line break, or even a strophe, panning quickly from the speaker to…

When you become obsessed with creating realism you create something fake. When you become obsessed with recreating reality you can create something hilarious. This idea hit me hard while watching the “Smokers Allowed” episode of Nathan Fielder’s Comedy Central series Nathan for You. For the uninitiated, Nathan for You plays like a bizzaro Home and Garden TV reality show. It uses all of the language: the cheesy stock music, the camera wipes, Dutch angles, and, my personal favourite, the host walking towards the camera to make you feel like you’re watching a legitimate business remodelling show. It doesn’t feel like a parody—BUT IT IS. Fielder plays the host, who is sincere in his desire to help his “clients” (struggling small business proprietors), but who seems equally concerned with his desire…

At the dawn of the decade, a brief break appeared in the first wave of New Romanian Cinema. Though of similar historic and cinematic concern, a number of the films produced during this period—including Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Second Game (2013), Cristi Puiu’s Three Interpretation Exercises (2012), and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010), by elder statesman Andrei Ujica—adopted formal strategies unique in relation to the work that had set the movement’s stylistic coordinates in the mid-’00s. Considering the recognizably austere, culturally interrogative output of these and other filmmakers in the years since (see, most impressively, Porumboiu’s The Treasure and Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below, both from 2015), these otherwise fleeting few years have arguably proven as crucial as they were initially deemed cursory—less a wake than an interlude portending an…

With birds singing above, a 71-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud sits dressed as the 76-year-old Sun King, pale and powdered under his big wig, nobly stationed amid a twilit rose garden in his wheelchair, finally bidding to his two eager valets: “Onward.” Thus begins Albert Serra’s fifth and most classically beautiful feature, La mort de Louis XIV, with a word—the film’s opening line—that’s suggestive of the sort of linear motions through history’s monumental events so often favoured in biopics and period pieces. Go, onward, in this direction, away from here and towards here, where we are now. Serra has manoeuvred around this problem of predetermination over and again in his filmmaking by counterintuitively opting to dramatize characters from only the most iconic Western narratives, fact or fiction—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in…

“I don’t really care so much what people say about me because it usually is a reflection of who they are. For example, if people wish I would sound like I used to sound, then it says more about them than it does me.”—Prince It’s a hit! Released in a whopping 300 French cinemas the day of its Cannes Competition premiere, Bruno Dumont’s latest comedy is his most successful film yet at the French box office. (As of early June, it has, unbelievably, more than 500,000 admissions.) Long considered brooding and Bressonian, a staunch proponent of naturalism with a predilection for non-actors, spartan dialogue, and primal gestures, Dumont has nevertheless sprung a few surprises over the years in a body of work that has consistently been ripe for auteurist reading.…

Time flies: has it really been a year since Dheepan won the Palme d’Or? Having not attended Cannes in 2015 (or ever), I’m not really in a position to recount, or seriously discuss, the well-reported on-the-ground scuttlebutt about how the anointing of Jacques Audiard’s social-realist thriller supposedly divided a jury (headed by the very essence of fraternal solidarity in Joel and Ethan Coen) or disappointed journalists. From my vantage point, l’affaire Dheepan seemed no more or less fraught (or important) than any number of other recent gossipy Competition contretemps. Not to mention that the selection of Audiard, a Grand Prix winner in 2009 for Un prophète, made sense from an all-in-the-family perspective: as our august editor has pointed out, those filmmakers once anointed at Cannes can expect to see the…

“Could be that all those venal mother-fuckers are us...if so let’s go easy on them.” A funk-art, found-footage, intellectual brain-bait stoner comedy, epistemological jape, and audience-pleasing masterpiece of the American experimental cinema made in 1970, Robert Nelson’s Bleu Shut (30 Minutes) is exactly 30 minutes long. Hence the film’s full title, and the voice of the woman (our hostess, Diane Nelson) who, during the film, reassures the viewer that this will in fact be the case. Viewers of the film may note that the movie actually runs for about 33 minutes. There is a clock seen keeping time throughout the duration of the film, superimposed in the upper-right-hand corner over whatever else is going on onscreen, which may or may not aid the viewer in this observation. Life and mov-ies…

Certain filmmakers tend to be reduced to memes. Hong Sangsoo, for example, makes the same film over and over again. The late Manoel de Oliveira made stodgy, “old man” films. Guy Maddin is a pastiche artist, Michael Haneke is a scold, Spike Lee lacks discipline, and Lars von Trier is a stunted little nihilist who uses his films to enact his own fantasies of sadism and revenge. These shorthand characterizations are a fantastic way to short-circuit any actual engagement with the films before us, and I by no means exempt myself from the tendency. Patterns emerge, but they don’t have to harden into glib logos—world cinema as Nike swoosh. As we turn our attention to the recent work of Malay-Filipino master Lav Diaz, we have to grapple with his cinematic…

In the first segment of The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, Tilda Swinton pays a visit to John Berger the week before Christmas. The actress reveals that she and Berger have been friends for over 20 years, the “bedrock to our complicity” formed by a shared birthday of November 5 (he in 1926, she in 1960, both of them born in London) and the “radical democratic humanism” that shapes their view of art and culture. “It’s as though in another life, we met or did something,” Berger says. “Maybe we made an appointment to see each other again in this life. Okay? Fifth of November. Okay. But it wasn’t the same year. That didn’t matter. We weren’t in that kind of time.” The time that interests Berger—where…

The already established conventional wisdom is that 2016 saw a strong Cannes Competition ruined by a set of awful awards from a dunderheaded jury of circus clowns led by third-time’s-a-charm George Miller—and while I certainly agree with the latter contention, the former may be taking things a bit too far. This year’s marathon of a Competition indeed started and ended strong, but plummeted to a predictable depth in the middle. Let’s say I saw around ten films worth taking home and re-seeing, which is about the same as last year—and for my admittedly high standards, that’s good enough. It’s tempting to co-opt the already classic final words of Albert Serra’s barnstorming “Special Honorary Jean-Pierre Léaud Screening” to the jury with regards to the awards, and next time they certainly will…

Cannes 2016, if nothing else, presented viewers with object lessons in the rudiments of political cinema, from the hoariest agitprop to films that might not even have been perceived as overtly political. I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner, personifies a certain brand of overdetermined, melodramatic social realism, and a wily viewer could predict the conclusion from the clues dropped promiscuously in the first scene. Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, on the other hand, despite some subtler clues, probably struck many viewers as more or less apolitical, a mood piece far removed from Loach’s sermonizing. Yet what’s compelling about Paterson is the tension—call it dialectical—between Jarmusch’s highly stylized elegy for a oncevibrant industrial city in New Jersey and his self-conscious homage to a poetic sensibility. A savvy “literariness,” to invoke Viktor…

Of all the fleet-footed scenes in The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, the one that best demonstrates the virtues of Juho Kuosmanen’s debut feature may be the first press conference sequence. Though the event’s ostensible purpose is to hype the fight that takes place at the tail end of Kuosmanen’s Un Certain Regard prizewinner, it shows that the most crucial conflicts and concerns here have little to do with the match: a featherweight bout between Finnish upstart Olli Mäki and American champion Davey Moore that took place in Helsinki in 1962. Perfectly attuned to the lowkey nature of Kuosmanen’s pugilist protagonist (played by Jarkko Lahti), the scene also provides ample proof of the deftness of the film’s humour, the sharpness of its characters, and the sweetness of…

“Mansfield Park? You’ve got to be kidding! That’s a notoriously bad book,” asserts Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), moments before memorably declaring that he never reads novels, favouring “good literary criticism” instead (though he later relents by confessing to a mild enjoyment of Persuasion). That onscreen disparagement aside, Stillman’s devotion to Jane Austen was all too evident in his debut feature. As preoccupied with such issues as courtship, morality, and social decorum as they are with taffeta sleeves, bridge games, and conga lines, Stillman’s debutantes and their debonair escorts are Austenian figures set down in modern Manhattan. Documenting the exploits of yuppies abroad in Barcelona (1994) and the genteel debauchery of aspiring upper-class clubgoers in The Last Days of Disco (1998), Stillman further developed a contemporary…

Midway through Ryan Murphy’s miniseries American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, a gossip columnist not so subtly glosses the series’ unstated goal of courting both thoughtful news consumers and impressionable rubes. Rather than leave the 20-year retrospectives of one of the highest-profile murder trials in American history to the likes of the professional vultures at CNN and HLN—who have thoroughly picked over the bodies of victims Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman since their deaths in 1994—Murphy turns the trial of the accused and ultimately acquitted running back, broadcaster, Hertz pitchman, and sometimes comic actor into think-piece fodder for armchair critical theorists and gossip connoisseurs alike. When the murder victim’s cocaine-dusted confidante (and future Real Housewife) Faye Resnick (Connie Britton) considers churning out a tell-all in time for opening…

Cinema Scope: Everyone Else premiered in Berlin in 2009, and now seven years later your third film is finally receiving its debut in Cannes. What took so long? Maren Ade: Directly after Everyone Else, I started working as a producer. I have a company called Komplitzen Film with Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach, so this took up some time, but it also really took so long to write the script for Toni Erdmann. It took me one and a half or almost two years. Then we had to do the financing, and I was in Romania for five months preparing. It was almost one year dealing with the shooting, and after that I had more than 100 hours of footage and I had to edit it, and again that took…

The Year of Trump now has its movie. In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature Aquarius a property developer tries to force the last resident to move out of an old but hardly decrepit apartment building on a prime beachside lot. The tenant is Clara (Sonia Braga), a respected 65-year-old music critic and breast cancer survivor, and though her ’60s roots would seem to make her as dated as her building, she won’t be pushed around by Geraldo the developer (Fernando Teixeira). It’s easy enough to conclude that plenty of developers can be assholes to victimized tenants, but the conflict in Mendonça’s drama is hardly so tidy. All of his narrative films, short or long, entail examinations of life in various urban spaces in his beloved coastal city of Recife, in…

A Sufi western? In the parole of Cannes’ critical taxonomy, the designation bestowed upon Oliver Laxe’s desert-fevered, Semaine de la Critique-winning allegory would seem reductive if it didn’t allude, paradoxically, to the film’s radically expansive nature. This leads one to wonder just what “a Sufi western” might look like, or how it could be fulfilled, in cinematic terms. A clue to Laxe’s strategy can be inferred, as with most films, from the very first frame: Mimosas opens with a shot of a wall mural depicting an ancient village set against the background of a vast mountain range, absent any defining context. The mural’s paint is leached of colour, peeling away in patches. Within the wall is a door, and upon the wall a shadow, cast by a nearby tree. Offscreen,…

When people pontificate about the synonymy of baseball and life, it’s typical to talk about failure: about how even a good team can lose almost as often as it wins, or how every season is bound to end. “It breaks your heart,” declared Angelo Bartlett Giamatti in one of the finest essays on the game; “It is designed to break your heart.” True enough, but such sentiments now circulate so freely and frequently that novelist Richard Ford has diagnosed them as “the tendency among spoilsport sportswriters to make it all so elegiac and bittersweet”—to inflate the game’s triumphs and failures until they’re tragically life-sized. It’s a tendency that can carry over to baseball films as well, from the more obviously elegiac (Gary Cooper in pinstripes, bidding tearful farewell as Lou…

The police procedural—movie or TV series— could certainly do with some shaking up. It’s been a long time since Zodiac (2007), and nothing since The Wire (2002-2008) has matched that expansive urban saga’s sheer attention to street detail, institutional machinery, and political realities; things are better for the novel (fine evidence can be found, for example, in George Pelecanos’ D.C. books and Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles police and courtroom tales) since the novel remains the fountainhead for most of the best ideas and characters. Na Hong-jin, who gave a nod to the subgenre with his debut serial-killer thriller The Chaser (2008), clearly thinks the status quo needs a jolt, and his prescription is The Wailing. Every element of his third feature is designed to undermine and eat away at the…