Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 87 - Summer 2021 i Cinema Scope

In the name of the popular, delighting in reduction and obviousness, a boring assertion: the common ground of every film movement christened a “new wave” over the last 70 years has tended toward revision, a self-conscious desire to provide a true image of the people in opposition to the distorted picture given by whatever relevant iterations of official culture. The banality of this claim can be measured by the volume of cant and platitude produced in support of it, often by the artists themselves. There is, I hope, little need to rehearse these arguments regarding realism, myth, and so on. Who today can help but squirm when faced with the phrase “true image of the people?” Still, that more slippery thing called film culture continues apace in discovering fresh waves…

“Listen, darling, you’re imagining too much.”—Oyoshi (Sugimura Haruko) in Floating Weeds (1959) My second opportunity to experience the work of French filmmaker Jean-Claude Rousseau—whose patient, curious, and altogether cleansing sensibility is as radiant, pure, and necessary as that of any active filmmaker I can think of—came at the 2017 Locarno Festival, where he unveiled two new medium-length pieces, Arrière-saison and Si loin, si proche. This pairing, the first of what now amounts to three completed works that he shot in Japan, marked the most significant evolution in his otherwise remarkably consistent aesthetic tendencies. Namely, they were shot in HD video, and therefore in the comparatively wide 16:9 frame—an ironic gesture given that these films saw Rousseau explicitly announcing his debt to Ozu, who so famously pooh-poohed CinemaScope by likening it…

If the four major feature films Joan Micklin Silver directed between 1975 and 1988—her self-financed first feature Hester Street (1975), Between the Lines (1977), Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), and Crossing Delancey (1988)—now seem considerably more radical than they did upon release, it’s not because these works weren’t well-received at the time. As the director herself noted in interviews throughout the 2010s, all of these films were surprise box-office successes, earning three to ten times their production cost; Hester Street even garnered Carol Kane an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, which was the first time a female-directed movie had appeared in that category since Dorothy Arzner’s Sarah and Son (1930). Still, even without, say, an Ishtar (1987) to tarnish her name, opportunities were scarce. By the time of her passing…

“If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you,” wrote Michael J. Weldon in his 1983 cult-movie reference book The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film; “the work of morons with cameras,” wrote Stephen King of Milligan’s The Ghastly Ones in 1981. Between the release of Milligan’s first film in 1965 and his death (from complications due to AIDS) in 1991, these two sentences represented not just the consensus on but also, more or less, the complete scope of critical response to his work. As a writer/director/cameraman/editor, he worked mostly in two disreputable genres—horror and sexploitation—providing bottom-of-the-bill slot-fillers for Times Square theatres, and working with budgets that rarely even approached $10,000. What reputation he had was largely built on his horror films, or really their titles: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1971), Guru,…

How equipped is cinema to not simply represent, but also replicate a state of altered consciousness? While efforts have been made to cinematically approximate the subjectivity of a person with mental illness or with senses impaired through alcohol or drugs, those that attempt the former have frequently fallen into ableist pitfalls while the latter have largely rehashed tropes of ’60s psychedelic cinema. The case can be made that most notable exceptions have emerged from the realm of experimental film, where artists working free of narrative constraints can be equally free of formal limitations, pushing their work toward the purely sensorial. Rare is such a tradition in the realm of nonfiction, however, arguably due to most filmmakers’ adherence to traditional documentary tenets of realism and representation. Faya Dayi, the first feature…

The Disciple, Chaitanya Tamhane’s second feature, is a film fundamentally concerned with the burden of tradition. Spanning roughly 16 years, it follows Sharad Nerulkar (Aditya Modak), a Hindustani vocalist whom we meet at age 24, as he navigates the world of Indian classical music—a centuries-old tradition that, most proximately to our idealistic protagonist, is defined by three primary figures, one of whom is physically absent. The latter is a legendary guru, Maai (Sumitra Bhave), an ascetic who reportedly shunned public performances and the recording of her music and teaching, whose memory casts a long shadow across the film. The other two are former students of hers: Sharad’s teacher Guruji (Arun Dravid), who is at one point introduced as “Mumbai’s best-kept secret” (which should give an indication of his humble-at-best means),…

A snippet of nature footage depicts crickets pitching chittering woo; smash cut to a newsreel shot of a wrecking ball demolishing a tower. A hapless Foley artist ooks and grunts an approximation of a spasmodic chimp; a blonde in black stockings canoodles with her canine in a glade in a public park. The male gaze intrudes…wait, is that Taylor Meade? (No.) A shabby cymbal-and-bass stroll slinks across the soundtrack, less stripteasical than pallid pink panther. People get naked, lips are smacked, groping ensues; macroscopic pondlife lick and suck, bomber pilots release their loads. In ten neurotic minutes, the movie climaxes again and again. Come-on, or plain comedy? Evocative of Ovid, or an altogether obvious joke? Take it off! Take it all off! Take my associative montage…please! In order to make…

Just past the midpoint of Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? the narrative pauses for a five-minute montage of children playing European football on the blacktop of a fenced-in basketball court. Accompanied by Gianna Nannini’s 1990 FIFA World Cup anthem “Un’estate italiana,” the scene, which plays out entirely in slow motion, is at once part and parcel of this highly musical film’s many interludes and the most conspicuous of its untold number of narrative culs de sac. Breaking from the film’s tragicomic romance story to focus on the exuberant faces and energetic movements of real-life kids who otherwise have no bearing on the plot, it announces the conclusion to the first part of a film that, up to this point, had betrayed no signs…

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was, ostensibly, a film that couched a meditation on the mundane topic of marriage and mistrust in mysterious extravagances (operatic orgies, hints of the occult, dream logic). Watching it now, it’s abundantly clear that the film is actually most trenchant in its treatment of class, corruption, and the sexual penchants of an invincible, monied elite (embodied by Sydney Pollack). Non-tabloid critics may have sidelined this surreptitious subtext at the time of Eyes Wide Shut’s release, but in the current climate, online discourse has latched on to the connection between the film’s horny, masked cabal and the sex-trafficking ring run by Jeffrey Epstein for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Dasha Nekrasova’s first feature, The Scary of Sixty-First, is an homage to Eyes Wide…

“Of course I’ve been influenced by all the people who were good before me.”—Thelonious Monk The two most cherished film books in the pile on my bedside table are in a language my command of which is rudimentary at best. But since both Jacques Lourcelles’ Dictionnaire du Cinéma – Les Films as well as Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier’s 50 ans de cinéma américain have never been translated from French into either English or German, I gladly make do, filling the gaps with a mixture of autodidactic guesswork and occasional dictionary consultation, which for all its drawbacks has proved to be a viable method. These reference works offer riches to be found nowhere else, and are designed to be read in a piecemeal fashion and returned to for stimulating dialogue…

Zhang Yimou has released 22 features to date, in addition to a couple of shorts, two more features shot and ready to go (censors permitting), his grandiose made-for-TV pageants for the Beijing Olympics, opera stagings like Turandot at the Forbidden City, and, if we’re being charitable, the co-director’s label attached to the execrable 2015 Fan Bingbing vehicle Lady of the Dynasty. Like many directors of his generation from China, his earliest work arguably remains his strongest. His groundbreaking Fifth Generation dramas, spanning from Red Sorghum (1987) to To Live (1994), not only redefined what was artistically and politically possible in Chinese cinema (at least until the banning of the latter film), but also introduced world audiences to a cinema of powerfully dramatic chromaticism and tactile spectacularity that was both accessible…

The late Monte Hellman had a great run in the late ’60s and early ’70s directing an unusual series of low-budget films whose surface resemblance to popular genre pictures belied a smoldering ambition to forge a distinctly American mode of art cinema. Among these were three films produced by Roger Corman: The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966), a pair of taut, unsparing Westerns made back-to-back with Jack Nicholson, and Cockfighter (1974), an ambling, tragicomic portrait of a hapless gambling man played with battered grace by Warren Oates. And then there was Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Hellman’s visionary and now undisputed masterwork, a radically uncompromising film that simultaneously announced his arrival as an auteur and his permanent exile to the far edges of Hollywood. By declaring Hellman a cult…

Fairy tales routinely kill or banish parents to clear a path for the roaming imaginations of children. Recall that Hansel and Gretel must plumb the forest alone, assaying their own mettle, and the stranded Goose Girl cannot speak her secret self to another soul. Céline Sciamma, who said in an interview with Tricia Tuttle that she “wanted to get rid of the adults” in her stories, renders similarly untended youth stumbling into life. Throughout her work, the French writer-director rigs up respites from the confines just outside, boundless sweeps where her characters can play at being otherwise, only to then scupper them—a guardian, a man, money, marriage, the clock inevitably intervenes—and so show their ache, transience, and beauty. That these temporal films which magnify the small hopes sprouting between restriction…

The opening title card of Zack Snyder’s Justice League makes the bold promise that the film to follow is presented in 4:3 in order to “preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder’s creative vision.” That’s the first of many chest-puffing boasts (some of them earned) underlying the $75 million redo of 2017’s franchise-killing answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which saw the then-architect of DC’s rival superhero franchise cede control to former MCU darling Joss Whedon after Warner Bros. balked at the grimness of the DC Snyderverse to date. Faced with Whedon’s joke-heavy and radically foreshortened polish, the Snyder faithful began clamouring to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut in order to reclaim their glorious leader’s trademark muscular filmmaking and vulgar polytheism. And upon this rock was built (with the aid of a worldwide, production-halting pandemic)…

“Elevated horror,” a term coined by John Krasinski to promote A Quiet Place (2018), has come to signify something like “fake news”: it’s a sticky, self-defeating phrase ripe for repurposing. But what Krasinski gestured toward with this term is really a tendency, in the last eight to ten years, of horror films to contain monster-sized metaphors. Few of these films, often structured around racial or gendered traumas, are even as dexterous as Get Out (2017): one of Krasinski’s citations was The Babadook (2015), a movie of obvious intelligence and skill that is boxed into a corner by its analogy for bereavement, like the cage that traps its top-hatted monster at the end. To this list one might add It Comes at Night (2017), Midsommar, and The Lodge (2019), films in…

Sprawling, intimate conversations are crucial in the dialogue-driven films of Hamaguchi Ryusuke, but that which remains concealed—simmering behind a strategic facade, sheepish deception, or playful pretense—can be just as revealing. Consider the pivotal dinner conversation that takes place after a communication workshop in the 317-minute Happy Hour (2015), when Jun (Kawamura Rira) suddenly discloses the shocking news of her upcoming divorce trial and owns up to her infidelity to her callous husband. In Asako I & II (2018), the title character’s former lover Baku reappears in the person of her new boyfriend Ryohei—a completely different man in spirit and temperament, yet physically the same as her ex. Asako (Karata Erika) keeps this connection a secret, afraid that her partner might consider their relationship a sham, and herself unwilling or unable…

Amalia Ulman is probably best known for Excellences and Perfections, a year-long Instagram performance that led many to believe she was an L.A. sugar baby, her grid replete with fussy cocktails, half-baked inspirational quotes, an addled downward spiral, and some cosmetic surgery. When it was uncovered as such, the routine incensed her new followers and landed her on Forbes’ 2016 Top 30 Under 30 list, alongside people like Petra Cortright, Lauren Conrad, and Eckhaus Latta. What most may not know is that her placement on this list—by judges Sarah Jessica Parker, Sophia Amoruso (coiner of the term #GIRLBOSS), and home décor e-commerce figure Alison Pincus—along with a profusion of accolades from art and culture mags about her so-called “hoax,” later became the fodder her tattoo-artist father used to frame her…

Cherchez la femme, they say. It sounds nice, but what this expression actually means is that woman is the root of all (male) problems, always to blame. Claudia von Alemann’s extraordinary Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon, 1980), recently restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek in cooperation with the Institut Lumière, is a rare film that puts the pursuit of a woman at its heart—not so that she can be punished, not so that a man’s troubles can be explained, but so that her achievements might be rescued from oblivion and might, in the process, change another woman’s life. It is the story of Elisabeth, who abruptly leaves her partner and young daughter in Germany to travel by train to the French city of Lyon. When she arrives at her destination,…

It’s fitting that, like many viewers I’m sure, I fell under a contemplative spell halfway through the three-and-a-quarter-hour runtime of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, Kier-La Janisse’s new documentary about the British “folk horror” genre. Even before one starts the film, its dauntingly expansive treatment announces that it intends to stretch the definition of the genre beyond its most immediate touchstones, the so-called “Unholy Trinity” of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). While Woodlands Dark acknowledges the centrality and influence of these films—not least via retrospective interviews with surviving cast and crew members, including an in-depth conversation with the octogenarian Haggard as well as archival footage of Hardy (who passed away in 2016) and Wicker Man…

In the fourth and final episode of Exterminate All the Brutes, Raoul Peck declares in his commanding voiceover narration, “The very existence of this film is a miracle.” Those are mighty big words for a filmmaker to say about his own work—it’s hard to imagine even the always self-impressed Godard making such a statement—but by the end of Peck’s grand yet accessible essay film, the viewer can’t argue. Given the existing media power structure, given the odds against funding a three-years-in-the-making project about the history of white genocide against Indigenous and non-white populations across the world (and, even more fraught for fundraising challenges, with a particular critique of the US’ genocidal policies), and given the current political climate…well, yes, for Peck to be able to make this, and then have…

Mark Twain’s quote that virtue has never been as respectable as money could easily delineate the sumptuously sordid habitat limned in Azor, except that it’s precisely the kind of wisdom that the film’s wealthy habitués and their attendant financiers might invoke with complacent irony from within their insulated milieu of smoky parlours, agapanthus-lined lobbies, manicured hippodromes, and dutifully swept piscinas. Twain’s bon mot clearly undervalued the insatiability of capital accumulation, and in Andreas Fontana’s feature debut the Swiss private banker and his wife who arrive in Buenos Aires circa 1980 are certainly no innocents abroad. Still, the refined manner of the cosmopolitan M. Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), who is forced to liaise with foreign clients in the wake of his embedded colleague René Keys’ inexplicable disappearance, identifies him as…

“Mexico’s upper classes are asking for trouble,” Michel Franco told Variety last fall. With New Order, trouble has found them. The deep-crimson dress selected by prosperous newlywed Marianne (Naian González Norvind) for the lavish post-wedding party at her family’s spotless steel-and-glass estate is couture at its most ominous; don’t look now, but there will be blood. In point of fact, Norvind’s lady in red has departed the premises by the time they’re overrun by gun-toting protestors bent on extracting cash (and pounds of flesh) from its proprietors and their guests. But lest anybody fear that Franco’s light-skinned scion of inherited wealth is set to get off easy, the film’s second half takes pains to detail her abasement, step by step, as she’s abducted, held for ransom, and left as collateral…

Abel Ferrara is a changed man. While the evidence suggests that this is very good news for Ferrara himself and his immediate family, it could result in a minor schism in the manner in which his films are received. For most of his career Ferrara has been the subject of a Romantic cult that glorified his legendarily self-destructive behaviour, and often read this (literal) lawlessness as an integral part of his renegade creative vision. Even as perspicacious a thinker as Nicole Brenez (author of what remains the finest critical monograph on Ferrara) has tended to identify the director’s avant-gardism with the compulsions and self-destructiveness of his protagonists, figures who are thrashing about in order to free themselves of “impassioned bondage.” But if we only appreciate Ferrara as a belligerent wild…