Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 89 - Winter 2022 i Cinema Scope

Joanna Hogg chases authenticity. Her reluctance to call “Cut,” instead letting a scene’s action carry on via languid takes, static camerawork, and unscripted dialogue, reflects her intuitive sense of how small but telling slips within the typically dull cadences of British upper-middle-class social chatter can reveal roiling undercurrents of feeling. Yet while her debut feature, Unrelated (2007), convincingly sold this illusion of casualness, the visual and narrative rigour that underlies it came to the fore as early as her follow-up, Archipelago (2010). At one point in the latter, members of a family taking an off-season vacation are grouped against the severe blankness of a blue-gray wall, where an almost imperceptible differentiation in colour draws our eyes to a phantom square. The characters, who have holidayed in this house frequently over…

At once pre- and postmodern in its concerns, the cinema of Michelangelo Frammartino tranquilly traverses the tides of time. Over the course of 26 years, the Italian director has produced a small but mighty corpus of shorts, installations, and feature films, all of which stand outside traditional notions of narrative in both the storytelling sense and in the recurrent (i.e., industrialized) manner in which movies are typically produced and released. Nearly two decades separate Frammartino’s first feature, Il dono (2003), and his third, Il buco, which recently premiered in competition in Venice, where it picked up the Special Jury Prize. But if Il buco stands out in the context of contemporary festival fare, it does so as much for its deceptive integration of various storytelling as it does for belonging…

“The fact that at one time there was a camera in front of some people, which made them act in a certain way, and everything they may have thought or said or done at that time no longer has any importance. It is dead and gone; the only thing that counts is what remains, and what remains is a crystallization of it…It’s the moment when you pass from the stage of raw recorded reality into the dimensions of a film: that’s the point where you have the greatest responsibility, because that is when the film—whether you like it or not—is going to start to ‘say’ something. But it, itself, must say it, not me nor anyone else.”—Jacques Rivette on L’amour fou (1968), Cahiers du Cinéma no. 204 “Do not quench…

“You must teach her how to behave outside,” a distant voice drones over the phone to tight-lipped middle-aged patriarch Albert (Paul Hilton) early in Lucile Hadžihalilovic’s Earwig. That aloof instruction, beamed into an otherwise oppressively silent mid-century apartment as though it’s a high-level alien communiqué from mission control, constitutes a rare but welcome scrap of exposition in a film that is as stingy with narrative detail as it is generous with atmosphere. Despite its opacity, though, Hadžihalilovic’s minimalist adaptation of Brian Catling’s 2019 novel is affecting stuff, its portrait of the rhythms of a hermetically sealed home marked by a dreamlike simplicity and clarity of vision, while its eerie images of a non-standard family unit navigating the tender mercies of childcare and daily bodily maintenance bypass the brain to reverberate…

The sleep of reason produces monsters—or so said Francisco Goya, who used the phrase as the title of an aquatint published in 1799. The words appear as if etched into the side of a desk, atop of which a male figure slumps in slumber. From behind him, the menace comes: bats, owls, and cats emerge from the darkness with petrifying gazes, crowding around the man. Intended as the frontispiece to a satirical series devoted to “the multitude of follies and blunders common in every civil society,” the print takes nocturnal somnolence as a damning political allegory. Is this night, full of threat and incomprehension, the night of Payal Kapadia’s penumbral first feature? It might be. Set over five years, from 2015 to 2020, A Night of Knowing Nothing approaches real…

In the summer of 2017, the residents of Charity Crescent in Cathedraltown—an unincorporated town in the city of Markham, Ontario, just north of Toronto—were surprised by the arrival of a new monument to rival the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, which had given the town its name and served as its geographical and cultural focal point since its construction in the early 2000s. Sculpted by the artist Ron Baird, Charity, Perpetuation of Perfection was a 25-foot-high statue of the famed show cow Brookview Tony Charity, commissioned by the developer of the subdivision, Helen Roman-Barber. The real Charity had been partially owned by the developer’s father, the Slovakian-born mining executive and entrepreneur Stephen Boleslav Roman, whose Romandale Farms had previously occupied the land on which Cathedraltown was built, and who had financed…

Why do Macbeth? As a dare, to confront the challenge of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays? To “beat it into submission,” as Sir Laurence Olivier once put it? To face and overcome the curse of “the Scottish Tragedy?” Kurosawa Akira came up with an original answer in Throne of Blood (1957), which was to transfer the play’s medieval Scotland setting to feudal Japan and explore its theme of the fatal hubris of ambition as a means of reflecting, 12 years after the end of the Pacific War, on the folly of Japanese imperial ambitions. In their robust and suitably bloody The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971), Roman Polanski and his estimable co-screenwriter Kenneth Tynan took the play at face value, refusing to treat it like a “classic” but like the…

Formalist though I may be, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate any given film from its association with Netflix. This is especially the case during awards season, as Netflix is throwing away obscene amounts of money on tacky gift boxes for critics and Academy members. The lavishly illustrated catalogues that depict every aspect of a given production might make good doorstops, but affording films like The Hand of God the sort of coffee-table treatment usually reserved for Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh seems a little cocky. Few viewers have laid eyes on these films, yet Netflix provides all the trappings of classic-film monumentality. But ironically, the company may have stumbled upon a kind of formalist reality with respect to the films themselves. In the marketing department’s focus on eye-catching…

Since at least Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917), immigration has been one of American cinema’s great themes. The stories of the newly arrived have been related by a multitude of filmmakers, many of them émigrés themselves or the descendants of émigrés; Elia Kazan’s America America (1963), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1975), Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart (2005), and James Gray’s The Immigrant (2013) come readily to mind, but the list could stretch to hundreds. Yet for all the diversity of the protagonists’ origins in such films, there has long been a certain homogeneity to American immigration cinema. One principal reason for this is milieu: most films about immigration are set…

Spanish cuisine has dazzled the world for years with its imaginative brio and technological expertise, a truly avant-garde approach to food that is capable of combining and finding harmony between the most extreme elements. But there also exists a lower-middle-class tradition, one which is still followed in roadside bars, neighbourhood cafés, and small local restaurants, that similarly displays the capacity to make the gastronomically impossible possible with the benefits of only popular wisdom and a sense of thrift. This is the plato combinado, which, akin to the American Blue Plate Special, is a single, tremendously economical dish in which several disparate (and affordable) ingredients are combined: potatoes, meat or fish, tomato, lettuce, eggs, and more, in all possible combinations and variations. Though they will never feature in travel guides or…

In 1984, the American philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto articulated a theory of the end of art. His claim—entirely distinct from declarations of the death of art—was not that art would no longer continue to be produced, but rather that there was no longer any “special way works of art have to be.” Against Clement Greenberg’s influential conception of Modernism, in which the different arts would carry out a gradual purification of their respective essences (e.g., “flatness,” in the case of painting), Danto foresaw the end of all such master narratives, envisioning a “post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes.” There would no longer be any way to assign a priori artistic value to an object on the basis of a particular style or look, no way…

We begin in the air, a weightless gaze toward a mountained horizon. After some seconds, the camera descends, dropping beneath ground level, replacing the sky with a sheer face of pale earth. It settles, establishing a new ground. This movement is typical of Lucy Raven’s frequently drone-based camera throughout Ready Mix, the single-channel video which comprises the core of her presentation at the Dia Art Foundation’s newly renovated Chelsea location. Raven’s direction is rare in using a technology often relegated to establishing shots and information dumps to instead achieve an active, mobile frame composed at each moment with obvious intention, with care for harmonies of line and monochromatic shade, with an awareness of the signifying capacity of its ability to overcome gravity. These concerns are plain as the shot continues,…

Desire tends to figure as a destructive force in the work of Joachim Trier. Anders (Anders Danielson Lie), the protagonist of Oslo, August 31 (2011), is a recovering drug addict who, by the end of the film, slips back into his old ways after a day of morale-crushing confrontations with his past. In Louder Than Bombs (2015), war photographer Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) exposes herself time and again to the brutality of conflict zones, a compulsion glibly understood as a perverse rejection of domesticity. The eponymous heroine of Thelma (2017) desires so greatly that her wants literally manifest through a kind of irrepressible telekinetic sorcery, the cause of her childhood trauma when she inadvertently transports her baby brother to his death beneath a frozen lake. Guilt abounds in these films to…

At some point in the past five years, I detected a shift in how Clint Eastwood was being discussed by both mainstream critics and my curated Twitter/Letterboxd feeds. Well after the run of late-’90s/early-’00s potboilers (True Crime, 1999; Space Cowboys, 2000; Blood Work, 2002) that continued to position him as a present-tense star, as well as the two slices of Oscar bait (Mystic River, 2003; Million Dollar Baby, 2004) that reinvented him as a perennial awards-season player, his two self-conscious “farewells” to his star persona (Gran Torino, 2008; Trouble with the Curve, 2012), and even the one-two punch of politically ambiguous blockbusters (American Sniper, 2014; Sully, 2016) that reaffirmed him as a box-office titan, announcements of new Eastwood films—events which still felt commonplace and unremarkable in the mid-2010s—were now being…

The pear of anguish is a medieval torture instrument, whose spoon-like metal segments spread at the turn of a screw in its centre. Also known as the “choke pear” because it was often applied to the victim’s mouth, it could be inserted into any orifice. Strapped to the torture rack, young nun Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) gets a presentation of the pear by the papal nuncio (Lambert Wilson, luxuriating in an air of well-meaning condescension): “Joan of Arc was a brave warrior, as even her enemies had to admit. Nevertheless, she confessed her sins when shown the instruments of torture. Don’t pretend to be braver than Joan of Arc.” The torturer takes over, one-upping the nuncio’s hypocritical solemnity by dutifully declaring (before he inserts the pear offscreen into the screaming nun’s…

“If what I think is going to happen does happen, no one will send you the last film. You’ll have to come and get it,” declares Pedro (Will More) in the opening scene of Arrebato. Made during Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Franco, Iván Zulueta’s 1979 film is a dark child of the La Movida Madrilena countercultural movement: a claustrophobic film about addiction, of both the narcotic and cinematic variety. Pedro’s provocation is the catalyst for the other members of the film’s central trio—filmmaker José (Eusebio Poncela) and his actor ex-girlfriend Ana (Cecilia Roth)—to join his quest for the rapture referred to in Zulueta’s title. His early belief in the power of cinema dispelled by his experiences in the commercial Spanish film industry, José returns from home…

What you see is what you get. A man drifts around a small Dutch village, alone, video camera in hand, ringing random door bells. Whenever someone opens their door, he continues to film them in silence and with an apparently blank face, until something happens. What might sound like a sketch out of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (or Monty Python’s Flying Circus) is an unlikely concept for an audience favourite at a documentary film festival in this day and age. Yet without spoiling the plot (there is none), we can say that, despite opening as a genuinely disturbing piece of home-invasion psycho-horror, Guido Hendrikx’s real-life one-man show A Man and a Camera actually manages to end on a feel-good note. In the neo-Vertovian role of the silent stranger come to town,…

Artist biopics often entail a kind of contradiction. On the one hand, they study a historical individual, subject to the exigencies of the body and the contingencies of circumstance, while, on the other, they examine the subject’s art, which, qua art, must be understood in relation to an imaginative, and not strictly material, universe. By collapsing these distinct domains of inquiry, artist biopics often commit what literary criticism calls the fallacy of “biographical criticism,” two perfectly fine words that fail to be of much use as soon as they’re put together. Terence Davies’ Benediction concerns itself with this fallacy. In recounting the life story of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famed soldier-poets of WWI—whose wartime biography was previously chronicled in Pat Barker’s 1991 novel Regeneration and its 1997 film…

The tacit assumption of the “city symphony” is of a metropolis invariably harmonious, conducive to and cooperative with the machinations of both camera and director, the coalescence of an industrial apparatus. Kiro Russo’s native La Paz defies any such arrangement in El Gran Movimiento, which channels the inherent dissonance and manifest disparity of the majestic yet disintegrating Bolivian city. Zooming vertiginously from the Altiplano to the sprawling city basin below, the camera alights with increasing detail on the teeming cityscape—the faded façades, clusters of wire, and peeling flyers—as if seeking some sentient trace amid the material thicket. Sound becomes amplified to a feverish pitch: honking cars, church bells, barking dogs, radio static, and, finally, street detonations. Characters, at last, are exhumed from anonymity, emerging from what thus far could be…

“Forget what I’ve written in this letter. I just wanted to talk to you, to keep you in my head a little longer, because I miss you.”—Hoda Barakat, Voices of the Lost “Beirut is a place where life is suspended,” declares one of the protagonists of Borhane Alaouié’s Beirut: The Encounter (1981), arguably the defining feature by the recently departed Lebanese filmmaker. This comment not only speaks to life in the divided city during the protracted conflict, but also reflects broader themes in Alaouié’s films, particularly those produced during and after the 15 years of war that rocked Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. In a late-career interview, Alaouié echoed that invocation of suspension when he declared that “all of my films take place pretty much between two cities, on a…

Todd Haynes achieves an impressive array of objectives with his first bona-fide documentary in four decades of filmmaking. Among other things, The Velvet Underground functions very satisfactorily as an astute primer on the artistic and sociocultural petri dish of ’60s New York; a kaleidoscopic master class on postwar American experimental cinema, culminating in Andy Warhol’s calculating conquest of the scene; and a coherent history of the forging and fissuring of one of the most pivotal outfits in American music. Especially impressive is the efficiency and velocity with which Haynes’ film conveys said history without unduly abbreviating the band’s original six-year run, or offering apologies for the nastiness that both Lou Reed and John Cale were clearly capable of. Yet Haynes achieves here an even more notable feat, which is to…

“One ought not even touch a being like that.”—The Song of Bernadette The secret title of this valediction is, “Watching a bootleg rip of a Blu-ray of Ken Jacobs’ 1963 Blonde Cobra with the subtitles on.” (The very prospect sounds like science fiction to these aging ears, yet here we are.) It’s a typically short scribble, a polluted dream of purity, this time about the greatest nunsploitation film of the American avant-garde, and as usual, it’ll all be over almost as soon as it begins. As P. Adams Sitney wrote in Visionary Film, “Jacobs insists upon the idea of a film as a dying organism throughout his works. Blonde Cobra breaks down before it can get started.” Sounds like a plan: let’s call the whole thing off. With his monumentally…