Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 92- Fall 2022 i Cinema Scope

The periphery is always the centre in the films of Adirley Queirós, whether in terms of the people and places at the focus of his attention or the off-centre stylistic means he employs to explore their tribulations, and, by extension, those of Brazil. With this year’s epic, multiple-prizewinning Dry Ground Burning (co-directed with Portuguese filmmaker and academic Joana Pimenta) as perhaps their most prominent representative, the four feature-length works he has made since 2011 each burrow into different facets of Ceilândia and Sol Nascente, two neighbouring satellite cities perched on the edge of Brazil’s Federal District, which is also home to the Brazilian capital; the starry lights of Brasília may still twinkle in the distance, but the privilege they represent could hardly feel further away. Taken together, this quartet of…

Anarchic in spirit but formally composed, Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest operates in the dialectical fashion fitting of its era, arriving at an unsuspecting synthesis between such notionally oppositional forces. Indeed, its radical gesture may lie in the refusal to situate them as mutually incompatible. A portrait of the small Swiss town of Saint-Imier, where watchmaking had become industrialized as factory labour, the film charts the consequent rise of anti-authoritarian sentiment that took hold in the region in the latter half of the 19th century. Schäublin consolidates such a sweeping historical purview within the far narrower confines of the factory itself, observing the labour of loupe-sighted workers—mostly women—bent fastidiously over the mechanical marvel that is horlogerie. The film homes in with exacting detail on the intricate fabrication of watches, identifying the eponymous…

“Who? What? Where? When?” reads one of the advertisements for Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les vampires. Above these words, a question mark cradles the masked head of one Irma Vep (incarnated onscreen by the legendary music-hall performer Musidora), with only her twinkling eyes in view, pulling us deeper into her mystery. Decades later, in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996), Maggie Cheung—playing an alternate-universe version of herself who is summoned to Paris to play Irma Vep in a flashy, internationally co-produced remake of Les vampires—dons a mystique-conferring catsuit to re-embody Musidora’s criminal mastermind, only to be ultimately fired from the role when the production collapses. Yet even as this first iteration of Irma Vep suggests that the cinema of today lacks the spark to create a comparably seductive spectacle, it also…

“Thank God our art doesn’t last. At least we’re not adding more junk to the museums. Yesterday’s performance is by now a failure. If we accept this, we can always start again from scratch.”—Peter Brook Peter Brook’s dalliance with cinema may have been only peripheral compared to his absorbing, existential involvement with the theatre, but the fruits it bore should not be consigned to oblivion. Limited, uneven, and ultimately irreducible to any single cinematic tradition, the films directed by Brook do not even appear as the organic whole of an authorial vision. Each film is in fact a distinguished creation, even when adapted from a play he had previously staged. His cinematic version of King Lear (1970), for instance, was made eight years after he staged the play, and, by…

The image of Paul Mescal lost and losing himself in a crowded, strobe-lit dancefloor is the most haunting leitmotif in Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, a film that would be acutely musical in feel and structure even if it weren’t powered by such a carefully curated selection of underappreciated late-’90s UK chart faves (All Saints and Chumbawamba included). As glimpsed in the flickering light, his face expresses both the loved-up chemical bliss expected of the era’s aging ravers and a more disquieting sense of vacancy; it’s as if he’s not all there. And while that phrase risks being more suggestive of some garden-variety weekender blasted on E, here it means something more tragic. As played by Mescal with great care and precision, Calum is a man with pieces missing, and…

Cinema about sex is often enriched by summer settings: escalating heat can place bodies into increasingly erotic orbits as the seeming eternity of canicular days are pit against seasonal ephemerality. While fleeting yet formative attachments are the nucleus of countless films that centre sexual self-discovery, considerably underexplored are the unenticing experiences of sexual alienation and turmoil during the warmest time of year. The title of Québec filmmaker Denis Côté’s most recent feature, Un été comme ça, suggests the generic frothiness of a hot fling, but turns on this conceit to delve into the highly specific experiences of three women in a remote treatment program for hypersexuality and sexual trauma. Across Côté’s varied career is a recurrent fascination with isolated characters who act in perplexing, unexplained ways and resist being known.…

Among a new generation of German filmmakers, Hamburg’s Helena Wittmann is uniquely elemental, even primal, in her concerns. For over a decade, the 39-year-old artist has been exploring the outer reaches of cinematic storytelling through the medium’s singular ability to transform not only space and time, but also the spectator’s relationship with their surroundings. Human Flowers of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to her mesmerizing feature debut Drift (2017), pushes her formal and thematic predilections towards a vanishing point where narrative dovetails with pure aesthetic elegance. A standout in this summer’s Locarno competition, it marks a major step up for Wittmann in terms of profile and visibility, and carries with it a certain seriousness of intent that harkens back to art cinema’s heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when ambition and ambiguity…

In 1969, following the critical success of Nothing But a Man (1964), still his best-known film to date, Michael Roemer made The Plot Against Harry. Centred on Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest), a smalltime racketeer who attempts to rehabilitate himself in the Jewish community after a stint behind bars, the film is a shimmering satire that balances a scrupulously researched portrayal of its milieu with a rollicking, carnivalesque atmosphere. The trouble with Harry, though, was that when it first screened for audiences, no one laughed. The project was then shelved indefinitely until, in 1989, a combination of accident and initiative led Roemer to strike a new 35mm print of the film and submit it to various festivals. It was subsequently selected for the New York Film Festival—giving the director his second…

Nathan Fielder’s newest television show, The Rehearsal—which was renewed for a second season at the recent close of its dizzying six-episode run on HBO—is a true comedy, in the sense that it’s really a tragedy. A deeply funny show wrapped around a startling core of sadness, The Rehearsal sets its sights on the tangled notion that the more we instrumentalize or attempt to control the world, the more the reality of that world and those in it seems to escape us. This is not a novel concern: historians and philosophers have long argued over whether reality’s recession, as the flip side of individuals’ growing alienation from lived experience, dates from the Industrial Revolution, the Reformation, or some other, earlier event. But The Rehearsal’s dizzyingly sharp take on the issue reveals…

Appearing at charmingly irregular intervals between 1970 and 1987, the 13 volumes of Afterimage comprise an odd, heterodox entry in the history of the “theoretical turn” in film criticism. Less dogmatic than their French counterparts (both literal and spiritual), more playful than the heady severity often found in Artforum and October, this little magazine—it measured roughly 8” by 6”—brought together a promiscuous array of texts in general sympathy with a modernist sensibility that sought to reconcile the tension between the moment’s formal and political avant-gardes. In practice, this meant a purview stretching from the dawn of the medium to its latest arrivals, all taken up with admirable curiosity and, for the most part, a lightly worn seriousness. Independently published and released in runs between 500 and 1,500 copies, the magazine…

A pejorative superficially on par with its sister terms Big Pharma and Big Tech, which imply a gadgety reshaping of the natural world, Big Ag looms heavy over the sunny fields of Carla Simón’s acclaimed Alcarràs, which was awarded the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale and exceeded all box-office expectations upon its Spanish release. Set and shot in the titular Catalonian town, Simón’s sophomore outing surveys a family of peach farmers reckoning with their final harvest, prior to their orchard being razed to make way for a solar panel field. Peach farming is a generational practice for the Solés, carried out on a plot of land gifted to them by the wealthy Pinyols as a gesture of gratitude from the latter clan’s patriarch: during the Spanish Civil War, which…

“Fortune favours the bold.” Pliny the Younger famously ascribed this quote to his uncle, Pliny the Elder, as the latter encouraged an expedition to investigate the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. The Elder, however, was not rewarded by the Roman goddess for his bravery; he died while attempting to rescue a friend. The Younger’s writings on the explosion, though, were so detailed that they are still referenced by modern scientists, thereby attesting that fortune can reward some of the bold—at least for a while. Sara Dosa’s documentary Fire of Love profiles two such bold souls: volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, whose work on and footage of volcanoes—often captured at a truly startling, and dangerous, proximity—propelled them to fame during their lifetime. Far beyond disinterested scientific observers, the Kraffts were passionately involved…

It’s not as if Elaine May wasn’t a beloved figure in American popular culture for most of her life. Her successful pairing with Mike Nichols as an innovative improv comedy team in the late ’50s may have been short-lived—the duo broke up at the height of their success in 1961—but is regularly cited as one of the most influential and well-remembered comedy acts the US has ever known. Subsequently, May embarked on a respectable career as a playwright and performer on and off Broadway, which allowed her to branch out into the cinema, just as her former partner-turned-filmmaker Nichols had followed up his own successes as a Broadway director with the filmic double whoopee of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Graduate (1967), establishing himself as one…

Film festival politics being what they are, many were surprised when Alexander Sokurov’s new feature, Fairytale, was announced as premiering in competition at Locarno. Sokurov, the grand old master of Russian cinema, has had numerous films debut in competition at Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. In 2011, he even took the Golden Lion for Faust, easily one of his most grotesque and unwatchable films. Point being, if Sokurov was screening in Locarno (which, incidentally, was the first Western festival to premiere his work, with The Lonely Voice of Man [1987]), chances are good that the other festivals took a pass on his latest. This, in turn, raised more direct questions about the relationship between film festivals and “politics” in the more general sense. In Screen, Sokurov claimed that Cannes invited and…

Full disclosure: I am credited as an associate producer on Magic Spot (2022), the latest movie by Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh. Lest you think this presents a conflict of interest in writing about them, I assure you that it is only a credit. One day last April, Farley took to Twitter offering associate producer credits for anyone willing to pay, so I sent $200 for the privilege of seeing my name onscreen in a movie by two filmmakers who I think are among the best working today. The credit is at least partly a joke: “associate producers” typically have much deeper pockets than me or the nine other Farley/Roxburgh fans with whom I share credit. It is also partly not a joke: since 1999, Farley and Roxburgh have made…

In The Green Ray (2001), British artist Tacita Dean famously managed to capture on 16mm film the fleeting light that the sun leaves behind right at the moment when it disappears from the horizon. And, because a digital camera used by others at the same time, on the same beach, was unable to capture it, her film proves two things: one, that the green ray, despite being missed by almost all who try and see it, is not a legend; two, that only film can capture it. But the evidence is elusive, as Éric Rohmer found out while shooting Le rayon vert (1986), eventually choosing to underline through slow motion and heavy colour correction the phenomena he had been desperate to obtain for seven months (which was eventually captured by…

A woman’s observation that lichen has started to grow on a flower she’s been studying for weeks counts as bold narrative progress in Mark Jenkin’s decidedly low-stakes folk-horror curio, Enys Men. Shot in the same striking, hand-processed 16mm stock and set in the same seaside milieu as the director’s lauded feature debut Bait (2019), Enys Men is a more opaque affair than its predecessor, a mood piece about the totemic power of natural landmarks and the allure of sinking into the historical sites of past trauma. Staccato in structure and wind-hewn in style, with its stark visuals of rock cuts and crashing waves and abrasive, post-synced sound design, the film is a sensorially rich but occasionally patience-stretching exercise. Repetitive by design as it recreates the stultifying daily routines of a…

Whatever else you may have heard about Nope, otherwise known as “Not of Planet Earth,” know this: Jordan Peele’s third and most radical movie is his subversive inquiry into Hollywood. On the surface, such a stance is old news. At least as early as Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust, artists who have experienced the Hollywood moviemaking business firsthand have exacted some form of literary or cinematic revenge at the beast that has fed them. The irony is that it can sometimes seem that it’s some of the most successful in the Hollywood galaxy who engage in this project, whether it be Vincente Minnelli with The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Paul Mazursky with Alex in Wonderland (1970), or Robert Altman with The Player (1992). And Peele is nothing…