Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 93 - Winter 2023 i Cinema Scope

- Madame, quels sont ces yeux nombreux qui dans la nuit regardent? - Monsieur soudain ceci, soudain ceci m’étonne Il n’y a plus personne pourtant moi je vous parle et vous vous m’entendez puisque vous répondez! Monsieur à travers tout quelles sont ces images tantôt en liberté et tantôt enfermées Cette énorme pensée Où des figures passent Où brillent des couleurs? - Madame, c’était l’espace et l’espace se meurt - Madam, what are these many eyes that look out into the night? - Sir, suddenly this, suddenly this surprises me There is no one left yet I speak to you and you hear me because you answer! Sir, through everything what are these images sometimes in freedom and sometimes locked up This enormous thought Where figures pass Where colours shine?…

“I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name and I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him…”—opening paragraph of Nicolas Blake’s The Beast Must Die (1938) “To enter a moviehouse on Lavalle Street and find myself (not without surprise) on the Gulf of Bengal or on Wabash Avenue seems preferable to entering the same moviehouse and finding myself (not without surprise) in Lavalle Street.” Referring to the Buenos Aires street traditionally associated with moviegoing, Jorge Luis Borges felt compelled to open his positive review in the literary magazine Sur of the recent Argentine film La fuga (1937) with this “confession,” lest someone accuse him of blind patriotism. Three months earlier,…

Officially, Bertrand Bonello’s last three features comprise a triptych about youth, but there’s also a shadow interpretation waiting to be made of Nocturama (2016), Zombi Child (2019), and Coma as an extended, eccentric treatise on horror-movie history and aesthetics—call it a self-reflexive Trilogy of Terror. Whatever its debts to Le diable probablement (1977), Nocturama hewed closer to Romero than Bresson, restaging the late-capitalist tragedy of Dawn of the Dead (1978) in a Parisian department store minus any visible zombies, but with the creeping sense of persecution and dread intact. Less successfully, but with true daring, the partially Haitian-set Zombi Child walked with Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur down the path of mordant, morbid post-colonial allegory, waving at Candyman (1992) and The Craft (1995) along the way. And now, made deep…

The first thing one is liable to notice while watching A Woman Escapes, a feature-length collaboration between Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, is that the film comprises three image formats: 16mm, 3D, and 4K. The second is that each format roughly corresponds to the contribution of one of the co-directors. In her shorts and features, Bohdanowicz utilizes a handmade style that has come to be associated with 16mm formats; Toronto-based experimental filmmaker (and contributor to this very magazine) Williams is, next to Ken Jacobs, arguably the foremost proponent of 3D in an experimental film context; and Çevik, the Turkish director of Belonging (2019), here assumes responsibility for the 4K. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to three main characters, Blake, Burak and Audrey (the latter…

Despite the noises at night, the things we might see out of the corner of our eye, and the dark, winding hallways, there’s something comforting about a haunted house: we all have a desire for the past to not be completely gone, and maybe to think that the dead can still make their mark on the living. It’s in just such a haunted house—in this case a large, fog-enshrouded Welsh manor—that Julie Hart (Tilda Swinton) has come to stay with her elderly mother Rosalind (Tilda Swinton, Part II) in Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter. The reason for the Harts’ visit is twofold: they’ve arrived both to celebrate Rosalind’s upcoming birthday, and also as part of a larger project that Julie is working on. A filmmaker, she hopes to make a…

The case of Darezhan Omirbaev reminds us that in cinema, the line between eminence and obscurity can be very fine indeed. Throughout his career, which is now in its fourth decade, the Kazakh filmmaker has received official approbation in the form of awards at Cannes and Locarno, as well as high praise from notable colleagues (Godard, Garrel) and critics (Kent Jones, Alexander Horwath). And yet his work remains all but undistributed, and even the arrival, following an interval of nine years, of not one but two new films—the feature Poet (2021) and the 30-minute Last Screening (2022)—within a space of months, elicited hardly any fanfare until the Viennale celebrated the occasion by dedicating the fourth issue of the lovely polyphonic journal Textur to Omirbaev’s oeuvre. If Poet can be read…

When the death of Jean-Luc Godard was announced on September 13, 2022, it seemed that the French New Wave itself had died. That impression, led by a baby-boomer understanding of Godard’s work, flows from the double assumption that the Swiss-born Godard was basically French, and that his important work was basically a matter of about a dozen films made over less than a full decade, from À bout de souffle (1960) to Week-end (1967). After that he moved to the Alps, or Switzerland, or something, and then sort of went off the rails. The death of Alain Tanner two days prior to Godard could have pre-empted some of this nostalgic reductionism, but of course it didn’t work out that way. Compared to Godard, Tanner seemed to be an entirely different…

Whenever the decaying prospects for original filmmaking in the US finally force him to the hinterlands of prestige television, James Gray should consider adapting The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro’s doorstop biography of New York City master planner Robert Moses. Although Gray’s minor-key cinema of depressives and outcasts seems worlds away from Moses-style titans, his movies are nevertheless all about deals struck, favours granted and accepted. What critics commonly read as the filmmaker’s recurring focus on fathers and sons is more precisely an interest in transfers of power, when the leg up that’s being offered is also pressing down on someone else’s neck. In The Yards (2000), the core of the movie isn’t the chaste, incestuous love triangle of rising stars Charlize Theron, Joaquin Phoenix, and Mark Wahlberg, but rather…

After a protracted absence, Todd Field is back, and with a film that more than compensates for the wait. However, Tár shouldn’t be gauged in terms of some value system based on the number of years that Field has gone without a new movie (16, following his second feature, Little Children [2006]), any more than the gap of years between new works by Field’s mentor, Stanley Kubrick, should have been a measure for his movies. Tár is, on its own and without any context for this particular filmmaker, a gigantic and bold film spilling over with ideas, emotions, and a sneakily transgressive notion that cinema can still express the biggest concepts on the most personal level while delivering a weighty entertainment. It isn’t that Field has just stepped into the…

Early in Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts (1987), the porn performer Sharon Mitchell tells the audience at her striptease show that cameras and microphones are filming the event for her next movie. After reassuring the audience that they won’t be seen, she explains, “It’s sort of a surrealistic look at myself and my girlfriend and how we look at the X-rated film business and our relationship with each other.” A voice asks: “Is it more truth or more fiction?” Mitchell replies, “I don’t know because I don’t know whether I’m more truth or more fiction.” Pornography lends itself to this kind of chin-stroking about the line between truth and fiction. It’s a genre built on the tension between the documentary appeal of seeing private acts performed “for real,” and how stylized…

For its casting of non-professional actors within a mostly scripted narrative, Antoine Bourges’ latest feature, Concrete Valley, has already been called a docu-fiction “hybrid.” Set in the East Toronto neighbourhood of Thorncliffe Park, an initial landing spot for new Canadian immigrants, the film centres on Rashid (Hussam Douhna), a former physician from Syria who settles there with his wife, Farah (Amani Ibrahim), and their young son Ammar (Abdullah Nadaf). Apart from Ibrahim, who in the film plays a former actor, everyone who appears in Concrete Valley is an amateur performer. If it’s often difficult to tell this, though, it’s largely because of the film’s distinct conversational rhythms, which are driven by the simple fact of its characters having to speak an unfamiliar language: English. (For its regulation of tone and…

Oscillating abruptly and often painfully between conflicting states of adolescence and adulthood, Eva (Daniela Marin Navarro), the teenaged protagonist of Valentina Maurel’s I Have Electric Dreams, seems acutely uncomfortable within her own skin. While, on the one hand, this makes her arguably like just about any other 16-year-old—i.e., a boiling cauldron full of warring hormones, unmanageable emotions, and irrational impulses—at times she seems to represent such an extreme case that it can feel like Maurel is just a few steps away from adopting the more visceral tactics of body horror. However, the director also makes it abundantly clear, from the mixture of curiosity, loathing, desire, and disgust with which Eva regards her own physicality, that even ostensibly ordinary bodies don’t need any extra goop to seem alien or monstrous. Her…

“It’s something I need to do,” phys-ed teacher David (Steve Laplante) unconvincingly tells his long-suffering wife Isabelle (Marie-Laurence Moreau) about the space-simulation program he’s signed up for early in Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking, a droll, bone-dry satire of escapism and white-collar office workers’ delusions of grandeur. A step up in thematic complexity, concept, and set design from the charmingly small-scale Tu dors Nicole (2014), Viking mines a similar thematic vein to that film about an insomniac small-town woman whose dispiriting environment is punctuated by her incongruent visions of a world beyond it. Here, too, Lafleur employs magic realism to probe the tension between David’s lofty self-image and earthbound surroundings, his frequent astral projections of himself into the vast expanse of space taking him light years away from the drab, sub-community-college-level theatre…

When Jean-Marie Straub’s La France contre les robots—filmed in December 2019 down the street from his apartment in Rolle—received an online premiere courtesy of Andy Rector’s Kino Slang in May of 2020, it was a small beacon in dark times. Not that the film’s life would have been any easier without the pandemic: let’s not forget that the German premiere of Straub’s penultimate film, the spectacular Gens du lac (2018), only occurred thanks to Klaus Volkmer at the Munich Film Museum, where it was shown with Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953). With Straub’s passing on November 20, 2022 at the age of 89, we can be thankful we received one last film and one that is every bit as radical, uncompromising and inspiring as what came before, no matter…

“Who’s out there?” Adam Driver’s Jack Gladney whispers to the ceiling (from whence we are staring down) with all the self-seriousness of a character in the thesis play of a drama student enamoured with but not entirely comprehending Brecht. “Who are you?” he adds, a beat later. With this and other vaguely postmodern discursions of perspective, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise seems to be not just telegraphing the loneliness of a man in the early stages of the dissolution of his marriage and sanity, but also aspiring toward a commentary on—what? Identity? Voyeurism? The nesting meta of adaptation as a form of immortality? Probably all of the above, which attests to Baumbach’s general oversaturation of his judicious source. DeLillo’s novel is acerbic, dry, and dark, haunted by…

In 2016, Alice Diop set out to the northern French town of Saint Omer to attend the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese woman accused of killing her baby girl. The French media was enraptured by the crime; the details made for a textbook fait divers, a sensational news item spun by journalists desperate to satiate their scandal-starved readers. Yet, as the trial unfolded, Kabou and her actions remained distant and impenetrable; her case became a kind of mockery of our legal systems, reliant as they are on classification and concrete truths to administer justice. At every turn, Kabou defied expectations: she was an educated woman, beautifully articulate and poised even as she repeatedly tweaked her story depending, it seemed, on her mood. Baffled by her own decision to abandon…

“I love cinema because its images are traces of something forgotten, a lost part of you. Suddenly, in a flash, you are reacquainted with your past…” This, from Pierre Clémenti in his A Few Personal Messages, a collection of essayistic journal entries written over the course of the 18 months he spent in a pair of Italian prisons, articulates the Bazinian party line in its sentimental dimension. We are moved by films because, briefly, deeply, they convince us that the past isn’t irretrievable, that life isn’t forever slipping away. But in his usual manner, Clémenti immediately complicates this, narrowing the perspective to an actor’s: “And at the very moment you’re playing the part, you become the person who will one day look back at yourself.” To be an actor, to…

About 30 minutes into Laura Citarella’s first feature Ostende (2011), a waiter named Paco (Julián Tello) asks one of his customers, Laura (Laura Peredes), if he can tell her an idea he has for a movie. As Paco explains, the film will begin at night, with a man in a yellow truck approaching a desert crossroads. To the left, a fire; to the right, darkness; and, in the distance, screams. Concerned, the man drives toward the blaze, where he comes upon a group of priests and a mysterious Dutchman conducting a grisly ritual involving torture and a burning car. When he attempts to leave, the man is knocked unconscious. The screen then cuts to black and the title card appears. “And then…?” asks Laura. “And then what?” Paco replies. “The…

Not since Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009) has a cop movie been so sublimely uneventful as Alessandro Comodin’s The Adventures of Gigi the Law, a slack portrait of an affable officer in Friuli’s polizia locale. Pier Luigi Mecchia (a.k.a Gigi)—the director’s real-life uncle, effectively playing himself—performs his perfunctory patrol in the town of San Michele al Tagliamento, but Comodin’s film is more modern pastoral than police procedural. It’s typically incantatory, owing primarily to the protagonist’s Friulano accent, first heard in a nocturnal prologue wherein an off-duty Gigi defends his overgrown garden from the remonstrations of an unseen neighbour. Prolix to a fault, even comically absurd, the quarrelsome exchange is framed such as to create a man-nature dyad that looks, to all appearances, like someone arguing with the deep green fronds…

The freight train barrelling along a moonlit overpass shows no signs of stopping, as Colton (Marcel T. Jiménez) cries out to Kyle (Jackson Sluiter), the latter just out of earshot and tramping along the tracks ahead. We’re left with only a protracted noise: the clang and whoosh of bogies hitting rails, without a single yelp or thud to confirm our fear that Kyle—a kind-eyed River Phoenix manqué who picks flowers for cat burials and skateboards down craggy terrain in a leisurely frame of mind—has been killed; our only sign is the reflection of a crescent moon wobbles in the water after the accident, as if the sky is twisting in acknowledgement of some terrible loss. Following this tragic event, Graham Foy’s debut feature The Maiden unfolds as a double-barrelled character…

The Kingdom: Exodus (2022), the long-delayed third and final installment of Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred’s supernatural television series, is kind of stupid. This doesn’t mean that Exodus isn’t enjoyable (it very much is), or that it lacks merit (it does not). But seen for itself, and in relation to its two earlier installments (1994/1996), the new series mostly seems like an extended jape, characterized by von Trier’s knowing mockery of both himself and the very idea of “peak TV.” Granted, The Kingdom was always little more than a portentous gag, using campfire ghost-story hokum to introduce various ideas (body horror, institutional indifference, the arrogance of medical science) in order to treat them, if not trivially, then with a somewhat limited sense of purpose. Von Trier developed The Kingdom…

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is the third in a series of portrait films by Laura Poitras focused on prominent activists pitched in quixotic struggle against dark forces undergirding the US as a global capitalist superpower. Unlike the divisive figures engaged by her previous features—Edward Snowden and Julian Assange—Poitras’ latest subject, Nan Goldin, could never be dismissed as a self-serving gadfly. An artist, witness, and survivor who has channelled her scarring life experiences, most notably opioid addiction, into her recent work valiantly fighting Big Pharma, Goldin brings a welcome human dimension to Poitras’ larger project to empower dissent. Thus, while Poitras closely follows Goldin’s spirited efforts to hold the Sackler family accountable for their willful profiteering from their signature product, the fatally addictive painkiller OxyContin, her documentary spends even…

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel Women Talking is set in a remote Mennonite community that exists out of time and under its own jurisdiction, with its own rules and superstitions. For years, the nocturnal disturbances that left local girls and women bruised and bleeding were thought to be a result of divine retribution, demons, or “female imagination”; it was later discovered that their collective nightmare was, in fact, repeated sexual assaults carried out by men armed with animal tranquillizers, many of whom were brothers, cousins, or uncles of the victims. When one assailant is identified and threatened with a scythe, the perpetrators are escorted into the city by police for their safety, granting the women two days to organize their response: stay and fight, or leave. Appointed…