Issue 79 - Summer 2019

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
Excuse me if I come across as discombobulated, it’s not because of any movie I’ve watched recently. No, I’m talking about far more important things than cinema: this issue is in the process of being closed while deep in the throes of Raptors mania, t
Cinema Scope9 min read
Philosophy In The Woods
I feel like prey. Perhaps soon you won’t anymore. If there is a dialectical movement to be found in Albert Serra’s decidedly non-dialectical films, it is in the relationship they figure between movement and stasis. Firm in the belief, or delusion, th
Cinema Scope8 min read
Come On Feel The Noise
There’s a pervasive hum that runs through Andrés Duque’s body of work, a strange overtone that simmers just at the threshold of our hearing. Thirty-five minutes into Dress Rehearsal for Utopia (2012), the soundtrack seems to drop out and is replaced
Cinema Scope9 min read
A Case for “Mere” Recording
Ryan Ermacora and Jessica Johnson’s Empire Valley (2018) opens with a wide-angle shot of a boulder surrounded by an imperfect circle of gravel, and then long dry grasses, pale green brush, and the easy swells of an arid landscape. The feet of two ext
Cinema Scope12 min read
Truth and Method
“Archaeology is about Digging” is the title of an essay by Thomas Heise, included in the DVD booklet for several of his films, including the 2009 film Material, a key film in terms of raising Heise’s profile outside of Europe. In the essay, the filmm
Cinema Scope12 min read
Thinking in Images
“I am forever indebted to cinema,” wrote singer-songwriter Scott Walker in 2007. “It’s always been there for me in all manner of ways. I would not have lived my life here in Europe without it. Now and then I’ve found myself wandering in dark towns or
Cinema Scope9 min read
The Meeting of Two Queens
“What’s so great about Doris Wishman?” Doris Wishman asks Peggy Ahwesh in a quintessentially irascible Wishmanian gesture, simultaneously a self-negation and a demand for affirmation, even if one can’t tell exactly which. One extended reply to the qu
Cinema Scope7 min readGender Studies
Double Takes
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes; if we opened me up, we’d find beaches,” says Agnès Varda in her anti-memoir Les plages d’Agnès (2008), which, characteristically, is far more about other people than it is about herself. Varda’s films lo
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Good Fight
In the first scene of Julia Reichert’s first film, Growing Up Female (co-directed with Jim Klein, 1971), a woman takes the hand of a young girl, walks her down the front steps of a house, and guides her along an Ohio sidewalk, the girl moving along a
Cinema Scope11 min read
Cannes 2019
The pace and amount of change battering down not only the doors of Cannes but cinema as a whole, especially as it relates to production, distribution, and issues of diversity—all of this, of course, ramifications of external, global changes—means tha
Cinema Scope5 min read
Parasite
Precisely a decade after his last film shot and produced in South Korea, Bong Joon Ho returns to a place that feels both familiar and unfamiliar with his Palme d’Or-crowned Parasite. Moving beyond the ambitious, overly conceptual, and uneven internat
Cinema Scope5 min read
Atlantique
In 2012, when French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop pitched her anticipated debut feature Atlantique as part of Locarno’s Open Doors initiative, the film went by the title Fire Next Time. While much in the film has changed in the time between its ini
Cinema Scope5 min read
It Must Be Heaven
In conversations addressing the plight of what was once known as the “Third World,” one of the central debates still involves the inevitable tension between nationalism—as well as the quest for national identity—and the rather amorphous concept known
Cinema Scope5 min read
Bacurau
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ongoing quest to sound out the tensions of contemporary Brazil takes a turn at once more strident and more oblique in Bacurau, an exhilaratingly jittery mash-up of genres and moods co-directed with Juliano Dornelles, the produ
Cinema Scope5 min read
Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
Abdellatif Kechiche certainly doesn’t bow to pressure. After his purportedly candid portrait of lesbian sexuality in the Palme d’Or-winning La vie d’Adèle (2013) was accused of representing but a thinly veiled masturbatory fantasy, he doubled down wi
Cinema Scope5 min read
Jeanne
I’ve exited the last several Bruno Dumont films wondering—only somewhat in jest—whether or not their maker had gone completely insane. Until 2014, Dumont was notorious for his straight-faced, neo-Bressonian, severely severe dramas that interrogated t
Cinema Scope10 min read
Killer Styles
The 51st edition of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs marked the first under the stewardship of Italian curator Paolo Moretti, who replaces former delegate general Edouard Waintrop following the latter’s seven-year reign as head of Cannes’ most prominen
Cinema Scope5 min read
Tommaso
In Abel Ferrara’s latest feature, presented in Cannes as a Special Screening, Tommaso (Willem Dafoe) is introduced perfecting his Italian-language skills with a local tutor. Tommaso is not only a little older than your usual student, but also already
Cinema Scope5 min read
J’ai Perdu Mon Corps
At the risk of being too whimsical even by the standards of what one may rightly expect of an animated feature based on a novel by the co-writer of Amélie (2001), the central conceit in Jérémy Clapin’s J’ai perdu mon corps could have easily gone side
Cinema Scope5 min read
Nuestras Madres
It may seem puzzling that a film about a young man’s agonizing, relentless search for his father should be called Nuestras Madres (Our Mothers). Yet as we come to realize in César Díaz’s Caméra d’Or-winning debut feature, the two are inversely linked
Cinema Scope10 min read
Curses and Blessings
I wouldn’t wish living in times like these on anyone. This, of course, is the irony of the title of Ralph Rugoff’s exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale, “May You Live in Interesting Times.” On the surface, the phrase reads as a blessing; actual
Cinema Scope5 min read
Everybody Plays the Fool
No one would call it “the show we need right now,” but HBO’s Succession—which centres on Murdochian media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his fuck-up progeny—pushes past wealth-porn TV and into the realm of true drama. Creator Jesse Armstrong previou
Cinema Scope10 min read
Extras and Streaming, Now, Then, and There
Readers of Movie Mutations, the 2003 collection I co-edited with Adrian Martin, will know that the Jungian notion of global synchronicity has long been a preoccupation of mine. One striking recent manifestation of this phenomenon came to light when I
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Souvenir
Given the evidence of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), time isn’t kind to moviemakers who decide to leap into autobiography: too often, such an endeavour entails rampant solipsism, a romanticization of histor
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Hottest August
It is, it seems, the End of the World as We Know It. Forty-two years after R.E.M. wrote the West’s definitive apocalypse-now anthem, the song’s essentially optimistic subtext has become even more sharply doubleedged: its parenthetical proviso can be
Cinema Scope4 min read
Diamantino
“There are no painters like Mr. Michelangelo, not anymore,” muses a lovably dense soccer star in the dreamy and borderline farcical opening moments of Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s debut feature Diamantino. The inventive, genre-hopscotching f
Cinema Scope5 min read
Too Late to Die Young
If the prerogatives of a democratically elected or militarily established government can be discerned in its early days—that critical moment when those matters deemed most pressing are promptly and swiftly dealt with—then the intentions of the 1973 m
Cinema Scope3 min read
Flaubert Dreams of Travel But the Illness of His Mother Prevents It
Undersung filmmaker Ken Kobland’s strange, sumptuous slice of classically minded surrealism, Flaubert Dreams of Travel But the Illness of His Mother Prevents It, created in 1986 in collaboration with The Wooster Group (America’s experimental-theatre

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