Issue 75 - Summer 2018

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
Believe me or don’t, but it wasn’t until we started to lay out this issue maybe a week or so prior to my typing this that I realized, hey, we’ve reached Issue 75, three-quarters of the way to a century. I guess some people might consider 75 to be a k
Cinema Scope8 min read
Exchange Rate
“I think Toronto is a wonderful town, smart and up to date, just like a good American city…makes me feel like I’m back home in Cleveland.” These words, spoken by a “Mr. Chester Vanderwick” (an apparently authentic Midwesterner, although I’ve always t
Cinema Scope7 min read
Transgressions In The Dark Age
After a string of US-funded anti-communist documentaries and neorealist melodramas, Korean director Kim Ki-young entered a new phase of his filmmaking with the wildly successful “Housemaid Trilogy,” comprising The Housemaid (1960) and its remakes Wom
Cinema Scope13 min read
Apt Pupil
Cinema, however realist it may ever strive to be, is synonymous with dreaming. Fundamentally past-tense, after the fact; industrially and institutionally representational; propelled, sometimes equally, by desire and terror—it is drenched in absence a
Cinema Scope11 min read
Towards An Anthropology Of Colour
Sara Cwynar’s Soft Film (2016) begins without an image, only words: “A quick history in a single thing.” A phrase with the canned authority of the TED Talk, torqued by its curious preposition. It is spoken by a man, his tone and tempo even, presentat
Cinema Scope8 min read
Corrupted Affections
The cult of the auteur has been the law of the land for so long that cinephilia can become a way of magical thinking, turning painful creative compromises into evidence of an overarching aim that may not have actually existed, finding in every twist
Cinema Scope16 min read
Last One Out of Germany
In the opening minutes of Ulrich Köhler’s new film In My Room, things don’t seem right. In fact, it’s all a bit glitchy, and the unsuspecting viewer might very well wonder whether the DCP is malfunctioning. The scene appears to be the aftermath of a
Cinema Scope12 min read
The Debussy Cramp
Like all Cannes film festivals, the 71st began brightly for this correspondent with the highest of hopes and expectations—and by that of course I am referring to Paulo Branco’s lawsuit against the Festival de Cannes to block the closing-night screeni
Cinema Scope9 min read
I Like America and America Likes Me
Cinema Scope: One of the biggest stories in Cannes this year is your physical return and the controversy that is associated with it, but, call me crazy, I want to talk about the film that you made, which is about a serial killer. Last time out, in Ny
Cinema Scope8 min read
Le Livre D’image
Last summer, the Institut Lumière in Lyon run by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux announced a full Godard retrospective for its annual restoration festival; rumours had it that JLG’s latest film, Le livre d’image, would premiere there in October. Excitem
Cinema Scope5 min read
Shoplifters
There was a distinct feeling in the air at this year’s Cannes that the Competition jury was under far more scrutiny than usual. The Cate Blanchett-led, female-majority group illustrated a gesture by the festival towards gender equity and a commitment
Cinema Scope5 min read
BlacKkKlansman
In a dispatch for Filmmaker from Cannes, critic and filmmaker Blake Williams asserts that Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which won the festival’s Grand Prix, is too “angry” and “didactic” to be “nuanced.” The implication is that Lee’s film is artless ag
Cinema Scope13 min read
The Morals of Nature
In the eight years since Poetry premiered at Cannes, narrative cinema of the sort that director Lee Chang-dong specializes in has hit a fallow period unseen in decades. Coincidence, perhaps, but one need not look much further than the festival’s inte
Cinema Scope5 min read
Happy as Lazzaro
Far removed from any realistic pretence and yet intimately connected to the ineluctability of the present and the obstinacy of the past, Alice Rohrwacher’s latest film unfolds in a state of fantastical rarefaction. No longer bound to the earthly natu
Cinema Scope5 min read
Ash Is Purest White
It speaks to the richness of Jia Zhangke’s oeuvre that Ash Is Purest White already feels like a career summation, even though the Chinese director has yet to turn 50. Transition has always been at the heart of Jia’s work, but this, his twelfth featur
Cinema Scope5 min read
Asako I & II
By far the most surprising and satisfying selection of this year’s Cannes Competition, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Asako I & II sets up and throws out stylistic paradigms faster than you can grab hold of them. As if to maximize the frustration of viewers who
Cinema Scope5 min read
Dead Souls
Watching Wang Bing’s Dead Souls at Cannes a few days apart from a restored screening of Safi Faye’s Fad Jal (1979), the citation by Hampâté Bâ that opened the latter felt particularly resonant, with its declaration that “In Africa, when an old man di
Cinema Scope5 min read
Climax
Ahead of Climax’s Quinzaine premiere, Gaspar Noé unveiled the movie’s hilariously boneheaded, almost exclusively text-based one-sheet: a rundown of his filmography, with each entry accompanied by a variation of presumed (not without reason) audience
Cinema Scope6 min read
Merci Pour Tout
Early in One Night Stand (a.k.a Alibis), the 1977 feature directing debut of Pierre Rissient, the following dedication appears onscreen: “To Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, Movie Business Casualty.” A name now all but erased from the cinematic fossil recor
Cinema Scope5 min read
Stiffest Upper Lip
The passing of director Michael Anderson at age 98 this April in Vancouver closes another chapter of film history. Among the most notable members of a British generation who channelled their own WWII experiences into the classic war movies that defin
Cinema Scope7 min read
Find Me Guilty
It’s inevitable that Warner Archive’s new releases of Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (both 1956) look Lilliputian when compared to Kino Lorber’s recent Blu-ray box set of the filmmaker’s complete extant silent works.
Cinema Scope13 min read
First Looks, Second Thoughts
In the introduction to my forthcoming collection Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues, I make the argument that although Truffaut’s book-length interview with Hitchcock doesn’t qualify precisely as film criticism, it nonetheless had a decis
Cinema Scope5 min read
Filmworker
Because, until recently, cinema has been as expensive an endeavour as yachting, the history of its artists, stars, and patrons tends to be a tale of the rich. Growing up in suburban Los Angeles and living in a middle-class neighbourhood full of house
Cinema Scope4 min read
The Rider
Having worked with horses his whole life and without any other means to make a living, Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) is left without his passion and his livelihood after he incurs a head injury during a rodeo. His shaved head gleaming with bloody
Cinema Scope5 min read
Drift
Who doesn’t recall from childhood the myth of seashell resonance? Holding a conch to one’s ear, the ocean could seemingly be heard in all its pelagic plenitude. The beguiling nature of the myth (that is, if one heard more than mere noise) resided in
Cinema Scope5 min read
Shirkers
In the closing moments of the Sundance award-winning documentary Shirkers—a compelling but compromised chronicle of the campaign to reclaim the lost and then found film of the same name—the original film’s screenwriter and star Sandi Tan tries to put
Cinema Scope3 min read
Harry Dodge’s Whacker
I am wantonly isolating Whacker (2005) from the rest of the work of video artist Harry Dodge, who has one of the wiliest names in show business, because the sun is going down and time is short and there’s yet quite a thicket of weeds upon the hill an

Cinema Scope

More Issues From Cinema Scope