Issue 74 - Spring 2018

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope2 min read
Editor’s Note
Again, it is with little to no fanfare that we reveal the latest annual ye olde top ten list of films that premiered in festivals (eight), theatrical release (one), or on Showtime (number one) in the calendar year 2017. The only question that occupie
Cinema Scope12 min read
Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is his fourth film in five years, following the reinvention-spawning masterpiece The Canyons (2013), the failed, compromised 2014 Nicolas Cage thriller Dying of the Light (recently repurposed, remixed, and reclaimed as
Cinema Scope11 min read
“You Never Heard of Code-Switching, Motherfucker?”
Joseph Kahn did not much care for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016). When the movie opened, he unleashed a sarcastic Twitter storm: “White people will love LA LA LAND…The dance numbers in LA LA LAND feel like Verizon commercials…99% of the couples
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Changing View Of Man In The Portrait
On November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a civilian American scientist and Central Intelligence Agency employee, fell or jumped through a window from the 13th floor of the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) in midtown Manhattan. Thus begins Errol M
Cinema Scope17 min read
Whatever Happened to Lizzie Borden?
—from a pirate radio broadcast in Born in Flames The revolution has been victorious, and the Social Democrats have been governing the US for a decade under the banner of equality for all. But sexism and racism still run rampant, leading to the founda
Cinema Scope15 min read
Community/Theatre
The question in any cinema that aspires to be devotional is this: where can we locate the spirit, the soul, the love? More specifically, where does grace become concrete? For Dreyer, it was in the face; for Scorsese, in the individual’s conscience, i
Cinema Scope12 min read
Do It Again
The quarrel between word and image is, on the eve of the third millennium of an illustrious career, in a period of relative calm, one marked by a casual cohabitation which has produced gratifying results in the arts and considerable trouble elsewhere
Cinema Scope12 min read
In Measured Praise Of Kawase Naomi
It is undeniable that the Festival de Cannes, and its artistic director Thierry Fremaux, wields a considerable amount of power in the global film world. If this were not the case, no one would care that Fremaux seems to have a personal investment in
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Mistress Of Suspense
Taking the lead of the film’s maker, the vast majority of critics writing about Phantom Thread have dutifully remarked upon the similarities between Paul Thomas Anderson’s film and Alfred Hitchcock’s first American picture Rebecca (1940), overlaying
Cinema Scope8 min read
Let England Shake
The United States was not attacked by the nuclear arsenal of North Korea on January 13, 2018, but it is a date that will live in infamy all the same. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” read an unsigned emergency message claiming that ballistic missiles were “inbo
Cinema Scope15 min read
Let Art Flourish, Let the World Perish
For Morgan Fisher, Another Movie is anything but another movie. The result of a decades-long reconsideration of the art and persona of Bruce Conner, Fisher’s first new film in 15 years attempts to reckon with a work of such time-honoured merit that i
Cinema Scope9 min read
Root Down
There are no actual trees in Tree Identification for Beginners, the latest film by the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. The absence is curious given not only the title, but the central role trees and other foliage have played in several of the artist’s p
Cinema Scope5 min read
Eye Of The Beholder
“We are not so much agents as intermediaries when we introduce film to light, as we might bring together two good friends, hoping they will love one another as we love them both,” wrote Hollis Frampton. Just such a benevolent spirit was Paul Clipson,
Cinema Scope10 min read
What’s the Story?
In Park City this January, all of those attending the Sundance Film Festival were told in no uncertain terms on a daily, if not hourly, basis that “the story lives in you.” The statement was right there on the cover of the catalogue, so dominant that
Cinema Scope9 min read
Season Of The Bear
If you’re looking for the lowdown on this year’s Berlinale Competition, which is known far and wide for its mediocrity, you’ve come to the wrong place. This year’s edition looked especially bleak on paper, and this writer’s one attempt to venture int
Cinema Scope8 min read
Chronicles of Deaths Forestalled
Televisual and serialized storytelling has long been haunted by a Scheherazadean sense of the relation between storytelling and death. Like that famous narrator’s death-defying fabrications in Arabian Nights, the longer a television show goes on, the
Cinema Scope9 min read
Heat-Shimmer Cinema
Consider the opening scene of Zigeunerweisen (1980), the first film in Suzuki Seijun’s so-called Taisho trilogy, to be emblematic of the whole, as it models the kind of mesmeric interpretive process that viewers must re-enact in the films that follow
Cinema Scope12 min read
A Few Peripheral Matters
Let me start by paraphrasing and slightly expanding a comment of mine appended to my 2017 ten-best list for DVD Beaver. A major reason for listing Criterion’s Othello first is that it includes the digital premieres of not one, not two, but three Orso
Cinema Scope5 min read
Hometown Horror
It’s an epidemic: the populist appeal of genre cinema is undeniable, even here at home. In a bit of a surprise, Robin Aubert’s Les affamés won Best Canadian Feature at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and then the Temps O People’s Choice
Cinema Scope5 min read
Visages Villages
The Normandy village of Pirou-Plage almost became a holiday destination. In 1990, property developer Pier Invest launched a plan to build a hotel, two tennis courts, and 80 vacation homes. The initiative would transform the built environment and econ
Cinema Scope5 min read
Ava
“Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the link
Cinema Scope5 min readPsychology
The Work
Early on in The Work, a documentary chronicling intense group therapy techniques practiced inside Folsom State Prison outside of Sacramento, California, a man suffers a violent meltdown. He is Brian, one of three outside visitors that directors Jairu
Cinema Scope4 min read
High Fantasy
Less than six minutes into High Fantasy, four teenagers on a road trip to a farm on South Africa’s Northern Cape—where they intend to camp under the stars and potentially smoke some half-decent marijuana—are sharing their emotional responses to the s
Cinema Scope4 min read
A Fantastic Woman
Premiered at Berlin a few months before its creator Sebastian Lelio’s first foray into English-language filmmaking with the Rachel Weisz-starring Disobedience, A Fantastic Woman sees the Chilean writer-director taking another angle on the tale he tol
Cinema Scope3 min read
Bruce Conner’s Crossroads
How many names can you call Bruce Conner? Surrealist, beat, prankster, poet, illustrator, assemblagist, filmmaker, punk. Spray-paint anything you like across Conner’s legacy and someone will think it sticks. A few years ago, a big brain from Harvard

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