Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 97 - Winter 2024 i Cinema Scope

Lately it feels like everywhere I look obscure old films are being dusted off and presented to eager publics. Even a right-wing newspaper like London’s Telegraph had cause last November to speak of a “repertory boom” in the city where I live, deeming it “the year’s most unlikely media trend.” Their idea of what this looks like is a bit different than mine; not everyone is “suddenly” lining up to see Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). What I have in mind can’t exactly be described as “repertory” in the standard sense, since it involves nothing like cycling through an established set of titles. Rather than the pleasures of the classics, it’s about reaching for the deepest of deep cuts. I’m thinking of the fetish for prints with provenance, the vogue…

“The problem is that it then goes off on tangents and the plot becomes secondary.”—A Mysterious World Until recently a somewhat forgotten figure of the New Argentine Cinema, director Rodrigo Moreno has, with The Delinquents, asserted himself as perhaps that movement’s most underestimated talent. Moreno’s first narrative film in nine years is several times more ambitious than anything the 51-year-old filmmaker has yet ventured, a work as sprawling and serpentine as his previous features were compact and unassuming. Just as telling, it’s a grand embrace of fiction following what seemed to be a slow, perhaps unconscious retreat from narrative storytelling. The director’s two most recent features, the docu-fiction hybrid Reimon (2012) and the observational documentary A Provincial City (2017), marked a distinct tonal shift in Moreno’s work, away from both…

In her 2023 book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell writes that “at its most useful…leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it.” The passage is evocative not only for the way in which it delineates the ever contracting parameters of free time, but also for the ways the language of temporarily is reoriented to the spatial. It feels like an apt point of entry for the work of Thai artist Tulapop Saenjaroen, whose increasingly ambitious video works over the past decade have attempted to engaged with these very questions. Few contemporary artists feel as attuned to late capitalism—and its insidious means of extracting both our time and resources—as Saenjaroen, whose works offer means of escape from or…

In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that mechanized war, industrialization, and urbanization were reorganizing human existence on a mass scale and were, in turn, making “experience” increasingly incommunicable. The storyteller, one who has historically made experience understandable—grounding all things (narrative, morality, practical know-how, history, tradition, and politics) in a telling of specific experiences—was thus necessarily disappearing from (Western) life. For Benjamin, where what will come to replace experience—information—disavows context to claim to be “understandable in itself” (all the better for its commodification), storytelling lives in specificity, avoiding the (informational) pull towards explanation. Storytellers report their own experiences or others’; they bring tales from faraway travels or they pass on local tales and traditions, all in the service of communicating experience. And as storytelling fades, Benjamin writes, so too…

Despite what you may have heard from some breathless movie critics, 2023 was a year of further decline for American cinema. But there was a promising inflection point: the year marked a moment when the seemingly unstoppable empire of Marvel began its long-overdue decline even as Marvel’s Enemy Number One, Martin Scorsese, ended the year with the aura of artistic triumph. His long-in-the-making adaptation of New Yorker writer David Grann’s true-crime saga, Killers of the Flower Moon, is the best movie he’s ever made. The extreme thoroughness, subtlety, and thought invested in this project indicate that, as Scorsese moves into his Joe Biden years, he has evolved into a more nuanced, more complex film artist. Recently, and for the first time in a while, I rewatched Taxi Driver (1976), which…

The latest film by Martin Rejtman reaffirms his singular place in Argentine and world cinema as one of the rare non-mainstream auteurs working today, with brio and invention, in the realm of comedy. Beginning with Rapado (1992), each of Rejtman’s fiction films have brought new formal complexity and philosophical depth to that broad and often dismissed genre through wryly detached, yet richly humorous, stories centred on haplessly charming heroes trying in vain to recover something unexpectedly lost—be it an object, a relationship, youth, or even identity itself. The Practice goes further by using its narrative of a yoga instructor, Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), re-evaluating his life while navigating a divorce and torn meniscus, to offer both a comic portrait of late-mid-life crisis and a self-reflexive distillation of Rejtman’s deadpan style and…

“There is a metaphor recurrent in contemporary discourse on the nature of consciousness: that of cinema. And there are cinematic works which present themselves as analogues of consciousness in its constitutive and reflexive modes, as though inquiry into the nature and processes of experience had found in this century’s art form, a striking, a uniquely direct presentational mode.” —Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow,” Artforum, 1971 The greatest film ever made that you’ve in all likelihood never seen, Will Hindle’s 1968 short masterwork Chinese Firedrill is a rarely screened, never-digitized chamber piece/psychodrama about memory, consciousness, involution, set design, comic/cosmic performance, and the inscrutable experiments and sublime experiences of photo-chemical cinema as it was just a little over half a century ago. It’s a movie of a very particular sort, granular and expansive,…

Don Siegel’s superior crime picture Charley Varrick (1973) was supposed to be called Last of the Independents, but that title was nixed by Universal honcho Lew Wasserman. This probably gives even more credence to the subversive, stick-it-to-the-system notion nestled inside this tale of a crop-duster pilot who has resorted to small-scale robbery for a living because he can no longer compete against the capitalist monopoly in his legal job. The film begins with the heist of a backwater bank, in which Varrick (Walter Matthau) loses two accomplices—including his wife (Jacqueline Scott)—but makes an unexpectedly big haul. When the amount is covered up in official reports, Varrick realizes that he and his dimwitted surviving partner (Andy Robinson) must have unknowingly made off with laundered mafia money, and has to rely on…

Two movies, both alike in indignity, in the ’90s, where we lay our scene. Because neither Videoheaven nor Pavements—both putatively non-fictional pop-culture essay films written and directed by Alex Ross Perry—have officially been released, programmed at a festival, or even announced via trailers or posters, it’s tricky to write about their intricacies, either as standalone works or in conversation with one another. Even if you don’t believe in the scourge of spoilers, it’s different to deconstruct a movie following its Sundance premiere than via a Vimeo link, on top of which a movie like Videoheaven, which unfolds as a three-hour voiceover meditation on the cinematic depiction (and metaphysics) of American video-store culture since the early ’80s, is so dependent on fair-use laws for its excerpt-heavy contents that talking about specific…

A teenaged girl is texting her boyfriend from her bedroom, seeking compassion: “I’m just in a really bad place right now.” The boy responds: “Oh, what are you doing in Germany?” Many can relate to this fierce meme which appeared on social media following the silencing of voices in Germany condemning Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Recently, the finding committee of documenta 16, the next edition of the German mega-exhibition held in Kassel every five years since 1955, collectively resigned because of the “unchallenged media and public discrediting” of one of their members, Indian writer and curator Ranjit Hoskote, who had signed a 2019 anti-fascist statement which the widely despised German culture minister Claudia Roth described, with her usual nuance, as “clearly anti-Semitic and loaded with Israel-hostile conspiracy theories.” As the…

Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world of speculation.What might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never openedInto the rose-garden. My words echoThus, in your mind. —T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets To describe a film as being “about memory” is almost as cliche as to say that it is “about time.” Few subjects are thought to be more suited to a temporal medium defined by its mechanical recording apparatus. Yet the films of the late Terence Davies…

In what will likely be my last column in these pages, I’ve mainly tried to highlight releases and films that I’ve been meaning yet failing to watch for ages, following the assumption that it’s now or never. As most of my examples make clear, this avoidance has something to do with the unhealthiness or pessimism these films tend to leak from every pore. But before getting around to these overdue discoveries, I’d like to celebrate a couple of “late” arrivals that are just over a century old. Frank Borzage’s Back Pay and what survives (about 50 minutes’ worth) of The Valley of Silent Men, both 1922 features made for William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions, had to wait 101 years to wend their way towards us, at least for the purposes…

At a recent NYFF talk on the trustworthiness of the documentary image, Frederick Wiseman quipped that back in 1968, having immersed himself in a prison for the criminally insane for his first film, Titicut Follies (1967), the logical milieu for a follow-up was that of a high school; hence, the subsequent year’s High School. Given the stylistic consistency yet markedly disparate subject matter of his vast oeuvre to date, it is curious to consider what, if anything, constituted the precedent for his latest film, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, a typically protracted look at an historically family-run restaurant near Lyon. What can the artist tell us about the institution when it seems he has, from the perspective of a certain cinema culture, become one himself? The contemporary emergence of food as…

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s sublime eco-fable, Evil Does Not Exist, begins and ends with the plangent score by Ishibashi Eiko, played fortissimo over an extended tracking shot facing skywards. A forest canopy, stark and stripped of its foliage by winter’s spell, appears like latticework through which daylight passes with an eerie vibrancy. Riding this sonic wavelength, one is immediately locked into the film’s peculiar pitch, a mix of awe, fragility, and horror quite unlike the Japanese filmmaker’s previous work. Instead, this foreboding feature hews closer to the films of Hamaguchi’s former teacher and occasional collaborator Kurosawa Kiyoshi, whose films strike a similarly otherworldly balance of moody contemplation ambiguous dread (the woodlands mystery Charisma [2000] stands out as a clear parallel). Evil Does Not Exist, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the…

It requires relatively little mental strain to imagine a world in which all that can be photographed has been; it requires, I think, considerably more to imagine one in which every possible photograph has been made. I find that both of these little thought experiments imply comic narratives—that is, to borrow a definition, ones which resolve in favour of their protagonists. And who might these protagonists be? In the former, I suppose the answer is obvious enough: us. I mean for this first-person plural to be understood in an adequately capacious manner that it might account for not just the human subjectivity which has to date presided over the domain of picturing—someone goes on pressing the button, moving the brush, smearing the pigmented fat on the cave wall—but also for…

This essay is a chapter from my forthcoming book, which I have called “a continuation by other means of my 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, a book about how movies have represented and misrepresented the city of Los Angeles.” It was written in 2018. The directors who did the most to make Los Angeles a character in movies and then a subject were outsiders, like Wim Wenders and Billy Wilder, or tourists, like Antonioni. They weren’t interested in what made Los Angeles like a city; they were interested in what made Los Angeles unlike the cities they knew. Just as there are highbrows and lowbrows, there are high tourists and low tourists. Just as there are highbrow directors and lowbrow directors, there are high tourist directors and low…

Clocking in at a clean 47 seconds, the title sequence in The Killer sets something like a metronome for David Fincher’s latest effort. Guided by the steady pulse of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, a montage unfolds on details of the eponymous, nameless assassin (Michael Fassbender) using his hands to execute his trade. Each shot, none more than a second and framed exclusively from first-person viewpoints and close-ups, keeps to the consistency of the music’s rhythm as an offbeat swells in dissonance to match his increasingly brutal methods. An integral component of Fincher’s filmography has been title sequences, with that for Se7en (1995) often being cited as his most iconic. Where that opener frames the details of a serial killer’s meticulous documentation of his handiwork as a form of…

With her 1818 novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley not only authored a story that passed into myth, but also invented a new type of monster that exists independent of that story. It is the Monster—and a familiar but shifting set of surrounding circumstances—that has been numerously adapted over several decades, creating wildly varying resemblances between the original text and its propagations. The most absolute tenet of Frankenstein’s Monster is that he is an assemblage of parts of dead bodies that is reanimated into life, though in Shelley’s original text the act is achieved by isolating the moment where decomposing flesh gives nourishment to a seed. When Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein immediately rejects his creation, it is not the revelation of a violent or uncontrollable nature that repels him,…

The aesthetic appeal of Sofia Coppola’s work—baby pink and pastel colours, girly make-up and cute clothes, soft lighting and trippy music—belies a deeper understanding of the condition of teenage girls, her favourite subject. For the filmmaker, these formal elements aren’t just their surface, but their very substance—the Lisbon sisters’ pink bedrooms in The Virgin Suicides (1999) are part and parcel of their identities. As Coppola’s young girls begin to find themselves, the culture around them offers options (more or less limited depending on the time and place) for self-definition and self-representation. In Coppola’s latest film, Priscilla, the eponymous protagonist knows, even before meeting her future husband Elvis Presley, how to apply her rouge, tie up her hair, do her nails, and what music to listen to (Elvis, of course). All…