Issue 88 - Fall 2021

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Scope
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER 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 Jennifer Scott WEB DESIGN Adr
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
After a year’s hiatus from the Croisette, we’re back with our first ever fall issue devoted to Cannes, which took place in July in the middle of a pandemic, in case you forgot. Because it was summer and travel was permitted, I followed the many, many
Cinema Scope10 min read
To Sir, with Love
Like all of Maria Speth’s films, Mr. Bachmann and His Class is a sharply observed portrait of people negotiating their way through uncertain, liminal spaces. At the same time, the documentary marks a sharp turn in Speth’s filmmaking approach, somethi
Cinema Scope15 min read
I Remember Everything
Amongst the research materials, set photographs, email correspondence, and treatment excerpts included in Fireflies Press’ new artist’s book on the making of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is the story of Eduardo, proprietor of the derelict Cine
Cinema Scope17 min read
Next Stop Eternity
Peter Tscherkassky’s 20-minute film Train Again unearths some new materialist marvels while expanding on those typically Tscherkasskian sensations the Austrian filmmaker achieves through the technique of contact printing, in which found footage is co
Cinema Scope14 min read
Do the Hustle
If you follow Sean Baker’s Letterboxd account—as of this writing, more than 68,000 people do—you may have noticed his deep dive into sexploitation and commedia sexy all’italiana (especially those featuring the Lolita-esque Ornella Muti) during much o
Cinema Scope8 min read
Trouble Up North
While parental absence is a key trope of so many of the Spielberg(ian) youth films of ’80s Hollywood cinema—not only E.T. (1982), but also The Outsiders (1983), Explorers (1985), The Goonies (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Monster Squad (1987), et al
Cinema Scope13 min read
Cartooning Unlimited
“Animation and comics are parallel industries that are dominated, unfortunately, by commercial interests, hacks, and bozos,” brooded animator and cartoonist Dash Shaw on the sorry state of his twin vocations in Artforum in 2015. Though this blanket s
Cinema Scope7 min read
Annette
When, due to financial reasons, Leos Carax was forced to shoot Holy Motors (2012) on digital video rather than film, something in him must have cracked. In one particularly memorable scene, Carax crosscuts between tawdry CGI dragons in heat and mock-
Cinema Scope13 min read
L’empire Contre Attack
So may we stop (talking about COVID yet)? If, like me, you were fortunate enough to spend some time in the south of France this past July, the answer is a resounding “no.” And thankfully it was a sweltering summer, for if an event like the one Cannes
Cinema Scope8 min read
Family Portraits
About an hour into Streetwise—Martin Bell, Cheryl McCall, and Mary Ellen Mark’s 1984 documentary about teenage street hustlers in downtown Seattle—a 16-year-old boy named Rat appears in close-up, puffing a cigarette, while on the opposite side of the
Cinema Scope5 min read
Titane
The erotic history of the car in cinema extends back nearly to the dawn of the medium: there’s Chaplin, in 1914, asserting in his first film that he’s a more enticing view than the soapbox derbies at the Kid Auto Races (no engines yet). Though the de
Cinema Scope5 min read
Ahed’s Knee
Nadav Lapid continues to take a scalpel to contemporary Israel in Ahed’s Knee, although this particular dissection might leave a bigger scar. The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) and Synonyms (2019) already flirted with autobiography, but his fourth featu
Cinema Scope5 min read
France
In the seven years since P’tit Quinquin, it has become impossible to continue tagging Bruno Dumont with the longstanding cliches of Bresson criticism. Epithets like “ascetic,” “severe,” “punishing”—already limited descriptors of his first two works,
Cinema Scope5 min read
In Front of Your Face
There is a dream in In Front of Your Face, Hong Sangsoo’s 26th feature, which screened in the inaugural “Cannes Premieres” sidebar, but this is a dream that, for once, we will not see. Hong’s films often feature unexpected awakenings from dreams in w
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Tsugua Diaries
2020 may go down as The Year From Hell, but at least it gave us The Tsugua Diaries. Rudely interrupted by the COVID pandemic in proceeding with not one, but two productions—Savagery and Grand Tour—Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes opted to do exact
Cinema Scope7 min read
Sun Salutation
The films of multimedia artist Neelon Crawford have been out of circulation since his retirement from filmmaking in the mid-’80s. But before leaving the medium behind to focus on his successful career in fine-art photography and painting, Crawford pr
Cinema Scope7 min read
Revising Revisionism
“This is the unwieldy version of the movie,” said Quentin Tarantino on the Pure Cinema podcast in June about his new 400-page novelization of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). “Unwieldy” is indeed the right adjective for QT’s new make-work projec
Cinema Scope7 min read
Seeds of Change
In July of this year, II Cinema Ritrovato ran a strand on Indian Parallel Cinema (curated by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Cecilia Cenciarelli, and Omar Ahmed) featuring some of the finest works from this important movement, which dates roughly from the
Cinema Scope13 min read
Heroines, Heroes, Dogs, Filmmakers
The way the Internet Movie Database tells it, two pairs of writerly brothers worked with Josef von Sternberg on his first talkie, Thunderbolt (1929), recently released on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray (with a knowledgeable audio commentary by Nick Pinkerton
Cinema Scope5 min read
Night Raiders
The appeal of dystopian narratives hangs on their capacity to hold up a funhouse mirror to the corruption and exploitation of our already extant social realities. Indigenous artists and filmmakers have long underscored the dystopic reality of colonia
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Green Knight
“One. Year. Hence.” It’s Christmas at Camelot in the opening act of David Lowery’s Arthurian fantasy when the severed head of the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) utters this ominous tagline, heralding two of the film’s most persistent structural elements
Cinema Scope5 min read
Friends And Strangers
It’s not immediately clear who the protagonist of James Vaughan’s debut feature is. Following the credits, which play over a montage of 18th-century artist William Bradley’s watercolours of English ships docking in Sydney (the settlement’s first repr
Cinema Scope5 min read
Old
M. Night Shyamalan’s Old never references Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (the film is an adaptation of a French graphic novel called Sandcastle), nor does it attempt to create visual equivalents of Carr
Cinema Scope3 min read
Suzan Pitt
From Dragnet, “The Big Departure” (Jack Webb, 1968): Kid, a would-be revolutionary just busted for stealing, among other things, asparagus seeds, with plans to cultivate them on the commune where he’s starting a new society: “Oh, yeah, I really dig f

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