Issue 86 - Spring 2021

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Scope
Mark Peranson ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN Vanesa Mazza MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Tracy CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman MARKETING COORDINATOR AND FINANCIAL MANAGER Hannah Paveck WEB DESIGN Adrian Kinloch COPY EDITI
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
When called upon to comment on a group of films, whether as a critic summarizing a festival or writing a year-end round up, or a programmer being grilled before a selection is presented to the public, inevitably the T word will enter the conversation
Cinema Scope14 min read
Journey To The Centre Of The Earth
Fern Silva’s films cannot be described as ethnography, personal/mythopoeic film, or essay filmmaking, although they often partake of all of those modes. Though his films are rooted in particular places and cultural spheres, they assiduously avoid the
Cinema Scope19 min read
En Plein Air
Following a run of creative setbacks and course corrections, Denis Côté returns to magnificent form with Hygiène sociale, a piercingly funny and exquisitely shot work that finds the Québécois filmmaker casting a critical eye on the nature of his art
Cinema Scope17 min read
We Can’t Go Home Again
Consider the strange history of the lyrical film. We can, according to its christener and chief exegete, identify the advent of this form with uncommon specificity: the creation by Stan Brakhage, in 1959, of Anticipation of the Night. “The lyrical fi
Cinema Scope9 min read
Modern Mabuse
Forty minutes into his incendiary final film The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), Fritz Lang invents a formal manoeuvre that has been imitated ever since: the camera, framing for a two-shot, pulls back to reveal that the initial image, far from be
Cinema Scope17 min read
Hollywood Ending
“Man, I work for an app,” scoffs a bike courier midway through The Beta Test, neatly summing up the subtext of this horror-comedy patched into a matrix of technocratic misanthropy. The title refers to an ad hoc data-mining scheme targeting wealthy en
Cinema Scope8 min read
Gag Orders
Bobby Seale makes a cameo of sorts midway through Judas and the Black Messiah, as Martin Sheen’s porcine J. Edgar Hoover—checking in personally on the progress of the FBI’s campaign against Chicago Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Ka
Cinema Scope6 min read
The Ghost Goes East
If you find yourself in Manhattan’s Lower East Side around Delancey Street—where the painted pink-purple steel of the Williamsburg Bridge dumps cars straight into the pizza, graffiti, and cellphone store-clogged heart of the city and where cyclists a
Cinema Scope12 min read
Not My Type
The finest genre study I know is Pursuits of Happiness, Stanley Cavell’s 1981 examination of seven Hollywood comedies— The Lady Eve (1941), It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940),
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Politics of Dancing
With the arrival of any new Adam Curtis film comes a deluge of coverage, commentaries, analysis, harangues, point-counterpoints, fact checks, further-reading lists, and good old-fashioned snark spread across an ever-expanding plethora of platforms. T
Cinema Scope9 min read
Sundance 2021
The weather at Sundance this year was great—mostly sunny, a steady 74 degrees Fahrenheit, based on my indoor AC monitor—although the wind in my Southern California desert backyard did kick up from time to time. But at the actual Sundance, not the vir
Cinema Scope9 min read
Reading Aids
When navigating the as-yet-unknown films of a festival program, nationality still provides a persuasive point of reference for some, a feeling underlined by the proud declarations issued by national funding organizations, promotional bodies, or parti
Cinema Scope5 min read
A Glitch In The Matrix
In 1977, Philip K. Dick gave a speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” in which he revealed that many of his dystopian novels weren’t the products of his imagination or dreams, but came from recovered memories o
Cinema Scope4 min read
Minari
I suppose it makes sense that “This is the movie we need right now” is the pull-quote (lifted from the Los Angeles Times) that internet-savvy distributor A24 prominently placed right at the top of one of their release posters for Minari. It’s an oft-
Cinema Scope5 min read
Promising Young Woman
On the set of Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), Delphine Seyrig said, “The common denominator that I share with all women is that I’m an actress. I think that every woman has to be an actress. Actresses do what all women are expected to do. We jus
Cinema Scope5 min read
Days Of Cannibalism
In his 2015 documentary Coming of Age, director Teboho Edkins followed a group of teenagers who plan to depart their rural village in Lesotho—the landlocked nation within South Africa where the Tennessee-born, now Berlin-based filmmaker spent his chi
Cinema Scope5 min read
Sound Of Metal
Entering Riz Ahmed in the disability cosplay sweepstakes as a young drummer coping with hearing loss, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal originated as a lightly meta vehicle for husband-and-wife sludge-metal duo Jucifer to be directed by Derek Cianfrance
Cinema Scope3 min read
Steina & Woody Vasulka
Icelandic director Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir’s extraordinarily warming 2019 documentary The Vasulka Effect, about the protean Eurohippies and rightfully dubbed “grandparents of video art,” Steina and Woody Vasulka, was exactly the movie I needed to s
Cinema Scope9 min read
Reclaiming the Dream
Her reflection comes as a revelation. In the safety of her bedroom, Connie (Laura Dern), the 15-year-old protagonist of Joyce Chopra’s 1985 feature debut Smooth Talk (recently released on a Criterion Blu-ray), adjusts her new halter top in the mirror
Cinema Scope8 min read
Taipei Confidential
During its rocky 20th century, Taiwan spent 50 years as a Japanese colony following the Sino-Japanese War before being abruptly returned to Chinese rule at the end of World War II under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) government. While Chiang’s fo
Cinema Scope18 min read
Learning to Swim
Some of the posters lining the city walls visible in the background of scenes admonish the reader to “Learn to swim!” while others illustrate the political frontlines of the time (“Hitler–Against Hunger!”). The setting is Berlin, 1931, and the protag
Cinema Scope16 min read
The Primacy of Perception
Near the midpoint of The Girl and the Spider—Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s overdue, much anticipated follow-up to their masterful debut feature, The Strange Little Cat (2013)—a character launches into another of the Zürcher brothers’ distinctive anecdot
Cinema Scope8 min read
Rotterdam 2021
One of the few major festivals to have taken place physically in the first three months of 2020, before others were forced to abandon or adapt their programs in the year’s long back half, the International Film Festival Rotterdam has reimagined its s

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