Issue 85 - Winter 2021

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Scope CA
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 xAND FINANCIAL MANAGER Hannah Paveck WEB DESIGN Adr
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
A lot has happened just in the past few months in the film biz, considering that a fair number of us still aren’t supposed to leave our homes for non-essential reasons, cinemas still remain closed in many places at the time of writing, and publicatio
Cinema Scope13 min read
The Crowd Is Dead, Long Live the Crowd!
for RMC It was a total coincidence and yet it felt freighted with meaning: when I returned to the cinema at the end of August after months of suffering with the small screen, the first two films I saw began with crowd scenes. The streets of London we
Cinema Scope12 min read
The Play for Tomorrow
One of the best known of Steve McQueen’s early video works is Deadpan (1997), a four-minute, 35-second loop in which the artist simultaneously places himself in harm’s way and in film history. The piece is a recreation of the famous Buster Keaton stu
Cinema Scope11 min read
Minority Report
The “About the Author” section of Armond White’s new critical anthology does not disappoint. In the space of four short paragraphs, White is identified as “esteemed, controversial and brilliantly independent” as well as “The Last Honest Film Critic i
Cinema Scope18 min read
All The Fountains Of The Great Deep
Artists who write clearly about their work run a serious risk: that they will be taken at their word. In much of contemporary art this dynamic has descended to the point that the work, the sensuous object, functions as little more than an illustratio
Cinema Scope9 min read
F for Fake
“I am very happy to accept this award in the spirit in which the screenplay was written—which is to say, in the absence of Orson Welles,” snarks Gary Oldman’s Herman Mankiewicz in the recreated newsreel that caps off Mank, as he receives the Best Scr
Cinema Scope15 min read
Minimalist Maximalism
With the Vimeo (self-)release of World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime in early October, stalwart Californian independent animator Don Herztfeldt has presented the latest chapter in his ongoing success story. Over 25
Cinema Scope9 min readWorld
I Thought I Was Seeing Palestinians
At the end of Kamal Aljafari’s latest film, An Unusual Summer, the Palestinian filmmaker recalls a memory from his childhood, centred on the communal garden outside of his home in the city of Ramlah, a 30-minute drive southeast of Tel Aviv: As a chil
Cinema Scope9 min read
Juliet Berto, Où Êtes Vous?
As the Nouvelle Vague recedes further into the digital sunset, Juliet Berto haunts film history alongside fellow icons like Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, and Anne Wiazemsky. To be sure, an aura of mystery endures in part due to Berto’s death from breas
Cinema Scope5 min read
Beginning
Beginning opens with a sermon on the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac, delivered to a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Georgia’s predominantly Orthodox Christian Caucasus region. Just as the preacher, David (Rati Oneli), starts to expound on
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Limbs of Satan
“Young things with a talent for living” was how F. Scott Fitzgerald famously defined the flapper, apropos of Joan Crawford’s star-making performance in MGM’s Our Dancing Daughters, which was released to much fanfare in 1928. The late silent era saw f
Cinema Scope6 min read
The Calming
Inertia implies stillness, but more precisely it means that without intervention any body resists change. The word conjures ceaseless motion as much as it does stasis—someone who cannot go on, or someone who can do nothing else. Something of this sem
Cinema Scope5 min read
Genus Pan
Marking Lav Diaz’s return to Venice four years and two features after winning the Golden Lion for the nearly four-hour The Woman Who Left, Genus Pan has invited easy jokes about its relative brevity by Diaz standards, clocking in as it does at a rela
Cinema Scope5 min read
Her Socialist Smile
In a year when even the most perfunctorily political film has been deemed newly relevant, it’s a 58-minute observational documentary from 2007 that, by quietly surveying the United States’ progressive past, points most perceptively to the struggle th
Cinema Scope5 min read
City Hall
Since his legendary 1967 debut, Titicut Follies, the now 90-year-old Frederick Wiseman has completed more than 40 features, which, taken together, constitute a prodigious catalogue of the American experience over the last half-century as revealed thr
Cinema Scope5 min read
Inconvenient Indian/Trickster
Early in Thomas King’s 2011 book The Inconvenient Indian—a sprawling look at Indigenous cultural history in Canada and the US—the author describes the infamous sculpture The End of the Trail by James Earle Fraser, depicting a depleted man in a feathe
Cinema Scope5 min read
There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse
The films of Nicolás Zukerfeld pit images against words, staging wily games of onscreen meaning-making. Literary miscellanea often spur the ambulatory narratives of the Argentine director’s works: a mysterious letter opens into two Rashomon-esque vie
Cinema Scope8 min read
Slow Reading
It was easy to miss the publication earlier this year of experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky’s second book, a volume of photographs entitled Eclogues: Letters and Correspondence. Printed privately by Dorsky as a gift for friends, Eclogues was sel
Cinema Scope6 min read
Auditorium Of The Head
Adaptations are perhaps congenitally bound to disappoint, if only because there arguably cannot be two imaginations that are exactly alike. While the reader’s visualization of a novel tends to be subjectively expressionistic, driven as it is by the “
Cinema Scope15 min read
The Importance of Not Being an Auteur
Teaching an online course on Agnes Varda at the School of the Art Institute this fall for 39 students has put me in regular touch with Criterion’s superb 15-disc Blu-ray box set The Complete Films of Agnès Varda every week. The packaging reminds me i
Cinema Scope5 min read
Hillbilly Elegy
In his 1892 inaugural address, governor William MacCorkle warned that in the coming years West Virginia would find itself occupying the same “position of vassalage” that Ireland held in relation to England, and for similar reasons: “But the men who t
Cinema Scope8 min read
Nomadland
A passage in Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland describes the unlikely birth and hard death of the life of Empire, a mining town in northwest Nevada. “In 1923,” Bruder writes, “laborers established a tent colony on the site of what later became the town
Cinema Scope5 min read
Another Round
“I had no problem talking,” Mads Mikkelsen’s buttoned-up history teacher Martin boasts of his first crack at getting buzzed on the job early in Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round. Martin is reporting back to his inner circle of drinking buddies follow
Cinema Scope5 min read
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery Of Prodigious Bribe To American Regime For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan
In the antepenultimate episode of The Sopranos, “The Second Coming,” Anthony Jr., depressed, unemployed, and newly single, confines himself to his bedroom reading news about the Middle East. Looking for a way to cheer him up, his sister Meadow enters
Cinema Scope3 min read
Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover
When I was young, people spoke of immorality.All the things they said were wrong are what I want to be.Over, under, sideways, down, (Hey!)I bounce a ball that’s square and round.When will it end? —The Yardbirds, 1966 Scrutable curio and irresistible

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