Issue 87 - Summer 2021

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
Perhaps it’s premature to proclaim “Cinema is back!” to quote a certain French festival director, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it never went away. Even though theatres are only now reopening in many countries (at the time of writing indoor
Cinema Scope21 min read
It Happened One Night
Just past the midpoint of Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? the narrative pauses for a five-minute montage of children playing European football on the blacktop of a fenced-in basketball court. Accompanied by Gianna Nannin
Cinema Scope8 min read
Brief Encounters
Sprawling, intimate conversations are crucial in the dialogue-driven films of Hamaguchi Ryusuke, but that which remains concealed—simmering behind a strategic facade, sheepish deception, or playful pretense—can be just as revealing. Consider the pivo
Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Scope
Mark Peranson Vanesa Mazza Andrew Tracy Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman Jennifer Scott Adrian Kinloch Jack Vermee ■
Cinema Scope15 min read
“I Prefer, Where Truth Is Important, To Write Fiction”
In the name of the popular, delighting in reduction and obviousness, a boring assertion: the common ground of every film movement christened a “new wave” over the last 70 years has tended toward revision, a self-conscious desire to provide a true ima
Cinema Scope15 min read
Can’t Get You Out of My Head
Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was, ostensibly, a film that couched a meditation on the mundane topic of marriage and mistrust in mysterious extravagances (operatic orgies, hints of the occult, dream logic). Watching it now, it’s abundantly
Cinema Scope10 min read
Crisis Management
Amalia Ulman is probably best known for Excellences and Perfections, a year-long Instagram performance that led many to believe she was an L.A. sugar baby, her grid replete with fussy cocktails, half-baked inspirational quotes, an addled downward spi
Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Studies
Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga Delve into the history and theory of cinema and related moving image media at UTM. Developed by award-winning faculty, this new Major explores major world cinemas, genres, and auteurs. I
Cinema Scope15 min read
Common Sense Connoisseur
The two most cherished film books in the pile on my bedside table are in a language my command of which is rudimentary at best. But since both Jacques Lourcelles’ Dictionnaire du Cinéma – Les Films as well as Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavern
Cinema Scope9 min readGender Studies
Remembering Women
Cherchez la femme, they say. It sounds nice, but what this expression actually means is that woman is the root of all (male) problems, always to blame. Claudia von Alemann’s extraordinary Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon, 1980), recently restored by t
Cinema Scope18 min read
Depth is Real
My second opportunity to experience the work of French filmmaker Jean-Claude Rousseau—whose patient, curious, and altogether cleansing sensibility is as radiant, pure, and necessary as that of any active filmmaker I can think of—came at the 2017 Loca
Cinema Scope9 min read
In the Earth
It’s fitting that, like many viewers I’m sure, I fell under a contemplative spell halfway through the three-and-a-quarter-hour runtime of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, Kier-La Janisse’s new documentary about the British “folk horror” genre. Even
Cinema Scope10 min read
Between the Lines
If the four major feature films Joan Micklin Silver directed between 1975 and 1988—her self-financed first feature Hester Street (1975), Between the Lines (1977), Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), and Crossing Delancey (1988)—now seem considerably more
Cinema Scope8 min read
To Each His Own Cinema
Zhang Yimou has released 22 features to date, in addition to a couple of shorts, two more features shot and ready to go (censors permitting), his grandiose made-for-TV pageants for the Beijing Olympics, opera stagings like Turandot at the Forbidden C
Cinema Scope11 min read
Monte Hellman
The late Monte Hellman had a great run in the late ’60s and early ’70s directing an unusual series of low-budget films whose surface resemblance to popular genre pictures belied a smoldering ambition to forge a distinctly American mode of art cinema.
Cinema Scope9 min read
Neutrality Is Not An Option
In the fourth and final episode of Exterminate All the Brutes, Raoul Peck declares in his commanding voiceover narration, “The very existence of this film is a miracle.” Those are mighty big words for a filmmaker to say about his own work—it’s hard t
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Grindhouse Genet
“If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you,” wrote Michael J. Weldon in his 1983 cult-movie reference book The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film; “the work of morons with cameras,” wrote Stephen King of Milligan’s The Ghastly Ones in 19
Cinema Scope6 min read
Petite Maman
Fairy tales routinely kill or banish parents to clear a path for the roaming imaginations of children. Recall that Hansel and Gretel must plumb the forest alone, assaying their own mettle, and the stranded Goose Girl cannot speak her secret self to a
Cinema Scope5 min read
Azor
Mark Twain’s quote that virtue has never been as respectable as money could easily delineate the sumptuously sordid habitat limned in Azor, except that it’s precisely the kind of wisdom that the film’s wealthy habitués and their attendant financiers
Cinema Scope5 min read
Faya Dayi
How equipped is cinema to not simply represent, but also replicate a state of altered consciousness? While efforts have been made to cinematically approximate the subjectivity of a person with mental illness or with senses impaired through alcohol or
Cinema Scope5 min read
Zack Snyder’s Justice League
The opening title card of Zack Snyder’s Justice League makes the bold promise that the film to follow is presented in 4:3 in order to “preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder’s creative vision.” That’s the first of many chest-puffing boasts (some of th
Cinema Scope5 min read
New Order
“Mexico’s upper classes are asking for trouble,” Michel Franco told Variety last fall. With New Order, trouble has found them. The deep-crimson dress selected by prosperous newlywed Marianne (Naian González Norvind) for the lavish post-wedding party
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Disciple
The Disciple, Chaitanya Tamhane’s second feature, is a film fundamentally concerned with the burden of tradition. Spanning roughly 16 years, it follows Sharad Nerulkar (Aditya Modak), a Hindustani vocalist whom we meet at age 24, as he navigates the
Cinema Scope5 min read
Siberia
Abel Ferrara is a changed man. While the evidence suggests that this is very good news for Ferrara himself and his immediate family, it could result in a minor schism in the manner in which his films are received. For most of his career Ferrara has b
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Empty Man
“Elevated horror,” a term coined by John Krasinski to promote A Quiet Place (2018), has come to signify something like “fake news”: it’s a sticky, self-defeating phrase ripe for repurposing. But what Krasinski gestured toward with this term is really
Cinema Scope3 min read
Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen’s Psychomontage No. 1
A snippet of nature footage depicts crickets pitching chittering woo; smash cut to a newsreel shot of a wrecking ball demolishing a tower. A hapless Foley artist ooks and grunts an approximation of a spasmodic chimp; a blonde in black stockings canoo

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