Issue 82 - Spring 2020

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope2 min read
Editor’s Note
And so goes the decade, and perhaps all of humanity as we know it—it was fun while it lasted. As a supplement to the Top Ten lists printed here, which semi-scientifically summarize the privately expressed preferences of our regular contributors, I de
Cinema Scope9 min read
A State of Uncertainty
There’s no exact precedent for the long creative collaboration between Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. In 1991, as the story goes, Tsai stepped out of a screening of a David Lynch movie and spotted Lee sitting on a motorbike outside of an arcade.
Cinema Scope8 min read
Impresión De Un Cineasta
The title of Camilo Restrepo’s breakout short film, Impressions of a War (2015), suggests the anomalies inherent in conceiving of a historical portrait of modern Colombia. A war is not typically thought of as something that leaves an impression; rath
Cinema Scope7 min read
The Oral Cinema of Sergio Citti
While radically democratic when it comes to spectatorship, cinema does not tolerate illiteracy on the part of its makers. Unlike storytelling, which can be both written and oral, films, in order to be made, require a modicum of technological proficie
Cinema Scope15 min read
New Possible Realities
The Last City, the new film by Heinz Emigholz, begins with a confession. “And it was a straight lie when I told you that I had an image that could describe the state of my depression,” admits a middle-aged archaeologist to a weapons designer (played,
Cinema Scope7 min read
Rabbit, Run
Explaining the rationale behind Jojo Rabbit in a recent essay for Vanity Fair, Taika Waititi spoke of how he was “getting tired of seeing World War II through the lens of the soldier” and “began to wonder what the experience was like for ordinary peo
Cinema Scope15 min read
This Dream Will Be Dreamed Again
Luis López Carrasco’s dense, devious El año del descubrimiento confirms his reputation as Spain’s foremost audiovisual chronicler of the country’s recent past, albeit one for whom marginal positions, materiality, everyday chitchat, and the liberating
Cinema Scope11 min read
Vagabond
At the beginning of Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985), Sandrine Bonnaire’s vagabond Mona lies dead in a ditch, her skin caked with mud and discoloured by the cold of a harsh French winter. This image of frigid fixity looms over the film, which th
Cinema Scope12 min read
Out Of The Inkwell
Like many of Kim Deitch’s sprawling, rambunctious graphic novels, his latest spans the long first century of cinema. Reincarnation Stories begins with an elderly D.W. Griffith, tight on whiskey in ’40s L.A. and lamenting for Hollywood’s “yesterday,”
Cinema Scope17 min read
Long Live the New Flesh
Let’s get it right out of the way: by any non-subjective metric—which is to say in spite of my own personal opinion—the Canadian filmmaker of the decade is Xavier Dolan, who placed six features (including two major Competition prizewinners) at Cannes
Cinema Scope3 min read
Jodie Mack
The rigorous and vibrant visual rhythms of Jodie Mack’s cinema were first impressed upon me in 2009, when I premiered a short film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in a section titled “Feminist Travelogues.” I was fortunate to have been programmed alon
Cinema Scope3 min read
Corneliu Porumboiu
There is a scene early in Corneliu Porumboiu’s When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013) in which the main character, a film director named Paul, sits in his bare kitchen, smoking a cigarette, caught in his thoughts. He seems slightly both
Cinema Scope3 min read
Jean-Luc Godard
I initially wanted this piece to be about a writer—after all, are not images and words inseparable, delicately intertwined?—but I was gently nudged to stay focused on the image side of things. The task itself seemed like an impossible process of elim
Cinema Scope3 min read
Sergei Loznitsa
I first encountered Sergei Loznitsa’s work at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. Though I was busy watching student films and shorts as president of the Cinefondation jury, I found some time to steal away and watch some other work in the Official Sele
Cinema Scope3 min read
Jafar Panahi
What would Harry Lime say about today? It feels like the time of the Borgias, but without the Renaissance. Oppression, trauma, and war are omnipresent—and that’s just on my list of the decade’s top films, which includes reflections on the scars left
Cinema Scope3 min read
Caveh Zahedi
Whatta freak. If you haven’t seen Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show, here’s how it works: Zahedi narrates a documentary about him trying to make a TV series. Every episode of the show is about him making the previous episode of the show, with th
Cinema Scope3 min read
Steven Spielberg
As a child, Steven Spielberg would contemplate the static on the TV. One can imagine that in the black-and-white squares one can see something like all the possibilities that may exist, like how X-rays have shown that the black square in Malevich’s B
Cinema Scope2 min read
Angela Schanelec
I’ve lost count, but I think I’ve seen Angela Schanelec’s The Dreamed Path (2016) probably half a dozen times since first watching it at TIFF in 2016. I saw it twice in that same week at the festival, as after the first viewing I immediately knew I h
Cinema Scope3 min read
Lucrecia Martel
“I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.”—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea Even if her films are quite different from my work both thematically and stylistically, Lucrecia Martel has been a const
Cinema Scope3 min read
Jem Cohen
Lost Book Found (1996), Instrument (1999), and Benjamin Smoke (2000), the first of Jem Cohen’s films that I encountered, were all made between the years 1996 and 2000—the apex of the anti-globalization movement, the early (more idealistic) dawn of th
Cinema Scope3 min read
Amanda Kernell
“Canadian history—or, how to wage war on an emotion. For a century, no one spoke of the extinction of joy. A village emptied of its children is a haunting.” —Billy-Ray Belcourt, from “A Country is How Men Hunt” There’s a reason why my father never sp
Cinema Scope3 min read
Ang Lee
Fourteen years ago, two members of the US Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, released a comprehensive study on the effects of low-fidelity video on human psychomotor performance, behaviour, and subjective perception. As ro
Cinema Scope10 min read
Against Mythomania
Forty years after it made its debut at the Venice Biennale’s Austrian pavilion, Valie Export’s sculpture Gerburtenbett (“The Birth Bed”) now stands in London, where the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has recreated the artist’s original 1980 installation. Th
Cinema Scope5 min read
Exit, Pursued By A Fox
Appended to his year-end Twitter list of his favourite movies of 2019, Barack Obama included a short but well-curated list of “TV shows that I considered as powerful as movies”: a holy trinity comprised of HBO’s Watchmen, Netflix’s Unbelievable, and
Cinema Scope9 min read
Power and Fear in Park City
Sundance equals power, and for a good reason: get your movie into the lineup, and you have an excellent chance of securing distribution in the US, a better chance by far than at any other festival. This means that it’s the supreme gateway, and despit
Cinema Scope10 min read
Second Thoughts & Double Takes
On “A Melody Composed by Chance…”—an excellent new audiovisual analysis of Jacques Demy’s Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) on the BFI’s Blu-ray of the film, written and narrated by Geoff Andrew and deftly edited by this disc’s producer Upekha Band
Cinema Scope5 min read
Beanpole
Kantemir Balagov’s debut feature Closeness (2017) garnered significant attention on the festival circuit, for reasons both positive and negative. Primarily a look at an insular Jewish community in a small town in the north Caucasus, the film institut
Cinema Scope4 min read
And Then We Danced
From drag performances to ballroom extravaganzas, booming club sequences to solitary swaying, queer cinema has often depicted moments of yearning or self-actualization through dance: think, for instance, of the erotic and essayistic function it serve
Cinema Scope4 min read
Murmur
In the three (non-student) shorts she has completed to date, Halifax-based director Heather Young centres on people whose social, environmental, and bodily conditions are doubled in the lives of the animals that surround them. In Howard and Jean (201
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Assistant
In the tone-setting opening of Kitty Green’s The Assistant, the protagonist, Jane (Julia Garner), an entry-level assistant at a film production company, arrives at her colour-drained Tribeca office in a darkness too deep to be pre-dawn. Initiating a
Cinema Scope5 min read
Saint Maud
The gruelling triumph of pro-Brexit forces last year has cemented the UK’s temperament as a nation whose collective search for identity, purpose, and renewal means never looking forward or sideways, only backwards. Then again, given the teeth-gnashin
Cinema Scope3 min read
For a Cameraless Cinema
“That photography is not a prerequisite for handmade cinema’s production means that we can more easily come to view how artists used a variety of materials—not only paint, but also rain, oil, or electricity—as well as other media, technologies, and p

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