Issue 73 - Winter 2017

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
It’s true that the bulk of the films that are covered in any particular issue of this magazine first show publically at film festivals, and, in many cases, only show at festivals. Thus, once again in this last issue of the year, we present a small se
Cinema Scope15 min read
Sightsurf and Brainwave
Blake Williams is a multi-dimensional character. A writer whose work has frequently graced the pages of this magazine, he is also an academic and a film artist. And, as a filmmaker, he has no time for flatness. No filmmaker since Ken Jacobs has been
Cinema Scope9 min read
The Uses Of Disenchantment
Accepting the Golden Lion at Venice for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro magnanimously offered this piece of advice to young filmmakers: “Have faith in whatever you have faith in.” This bit of winner’s-circle tautology was surely not meant to b
Cinema Scope10 min read
In The Shadow Of The Magic Kingdom
Set on the fringes of Disney World, where an invisible underclass scrapes together its transient livings in decrepit motels, the latest film from Sean Baker further develops the talented writer-director’s interest in the everyday realities of margina
Cinema Scope7 min read
The Limits of Control
To begin with a spoiler, Caniba concludes with a miracle—or at least this is how the film’s subject, the infamous Japanese cannibal Sagawa Issei, describes the sudden and unexpected wave of happiness that floods him as he is fed snacks and tucked in
Cinema Scope9 min read
For Future History
Barbet Schroeder’s The Venerable W. profiles Ashin Wirathu, a nationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar who has built his career targeting the county’s Rohingya minority. Schroeder charts Wirathu’s life from fringe extremist to superstar demagogue, traili
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Ties that Bind
In el pueblo, the 2016 survey of Latin American film and video assembled for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, curator Federico Windhausen notably included key works by foreign filmmakers that blurred positions of outsider vs. insider and what mark
Cinema Scope9 min read
Sohrab Shahid Saless
Two streams of Iranian film history flow into A Simple Event (1973). The first is the short-lived, pre-revolutionary “New Group” movement that sought to eschew the conventions of the commercial cinema of the time (after producing a few notable films,
Cinema Scope8 min read
Revisiting Marco Ferreri
The 20th anniversary of Marco Ferreri’s death failed to elicit much attention, the exception being Anselma Dell’Olio’s valuable documentary, presented at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Marco Ferreri: Dangerous But Necessary. Eschewing biographical
Cinema Scope15 min read
Giving Credibility To The Universe
“The .22 bullet tore a tiny hole into the canvas. The detonation was marginally louder than the crack of a whip. In the valley a crow protested. Luce emitted a short, husky laugh quite similar to the sound of the crow.” Thus begins Laissez bronzer le
Cinema Scope5 min read
3/4
A modest work of considerable grace and insight, Ilian Metev’s 3/4 quietly stands as one of the most accomplished narrative debuts of the year. Genuinely compassionate, the 36-year-old Bulgarian’s directorial voice echoes forth confidently from the o
Cinema Scope6 min read
Cocote
The titular nape of the neck invoked in the word cocote is both a marked corporeal designation and an intimation of something bad about to happen. In Cocote, it represents the site of a beheading and the dreaded aura of imminent retribution. If hacer
Cinema Scope6 min read
Dragonfly Eyes
How do you make a film without a cast or a cinematographer, a movie without a movie camera? The great Chinese conceptual artist Xu Bing has found a way that offers both unknown pleasures and uneasy challenges. Dragonfly Eyes is culled entirely from 1
Cinema Scope5 min read
Foxtrot
The first thing to note about Samuel Maoz’s new film Foxtrot, Grand Jury Prize winner in Venice, is that it’s been eight years since the director somehow won Venice’s Golden Lion for his debut feature Lebanon (2009). That too was a co-production, wit
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Green Fog
That Guy Maddin’s feature-length follow-up to his most monumental work to date—the staggering mise en abyme of The Forbidden Room (2013)—would be The Green Fog, a 63-minute, found-footage video reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), is ent
Cinema Scope5 min read
Madame Hyde
In addition to often being quite funny, Serge Bozon’s fifth feature and second consecutive Isabelle Huppert vehicle is an exemplary film about pedagogy, perhaps one of the great ones about intuition, and also one of the strangest screen interpretatio
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Wandering Soap Opera
The first indication of The Wandering Soap Opera’s unclassifiable nature is the fact that it can’t even be pinned down to a single year. The film’s closing credits are divided into two neat sections, separating those who worked on it in 1990 from tho
Cinema Scope12 min read
Just Another Notion
“If there’s anyone who’s under the age of 16, would they please leave the theatre now,” a solemn voice, deep, with a country upbringing in its vowels, intones against a screen of black leader, “and return when they are over 16. It would be greatly ap
Cinema Scope8 min read
Hollywood, Read
“I am not trying to make some new meaning from these films; I am striving to bring out the meanings that are there but obscured by the plot lines,” Thom Andersen writes of the method he employed for his film Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer W
Cinema Scope7 min read
Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce Que C’est?
In a recent interview about Mindhunter, actor Hannah Gross noted that, “If [executive producer David Fincher] wasn’t there, he was very involved in what the episode would be like, and of course the overall tone, what it would look like. The other dir
Cinema Scope11 min read
Fantasies and Favourites
Circa 1978, while I was living in a San Diego suburb and teaching a film course, I wrote a letter to Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel), who lived in another San Diego suburb, inviting him to come to my class and talk about The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), whi
Cinema Scope5 min read
They Are What They Are
Circles and squares: two evenly distributed shapes order and arrange the nontraditional continuity of Isiah Medina’s Idizwadidiz, one of the director’s first new works to screen publically since 88:88 (2015). The first of three shorts presented in th
Cinema Scope5 min read
Phantom Thread
SoCal being SoCal, it’s hard to leave it, especially if you were born there. The only good joke in Beatriz at Dinner has someone cracking wise about living in Newport Beach and the problem of going on vacation: Where do you go, since the best weather
Cinema Scope5 min read
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Located in the frigid climate of Canada’s Yukon, Dawson City was born virtually overnight when the discovery of gold in the region led to more than 100,000 would-be prospectors flooding into the area in the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1896, transform
Cinema Scope4 min read
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
There’s a moment early in McDonagh’s new film that neatly encapsulates the playwrightturned- filmmaker’s competing instincts toward moral sophistication and childish self-indulgence. As the bereaved protagonist Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) strut
Cinema Scope5 min read
Blade Runner 2049
Now that Blade Runner 2049 is officially a failure, its true life can begin. Indeed, only by becoming a catastrophe—according to The Hollywood Reporter, it will lose at least $80 million for its production company Alcon—could Denis Villeneuve’s film
Cinema Scope3 min read
Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision
Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision—first published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a fabulously special issue of Film Culture, designed by Fluxus forefather George Maciunas, bound in beautifully corrugated cardboard pierced with an eyehole, beyond whose v

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