Issue 84 - Fall 2020

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 Hannah Paveck WEB DESIGN Adri
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
As this strangest of years plods not-so-merrily along, so as well do we, much lighter in the pocketbook but with all the resilience of an army of Mulans. (I think that metaphor makes sense, as I cannot currently afford to pay $30 to see a Disney film
Cinema Scope18 min read
The Act of Living
“The night scares me so much,” confesses a courageous Yazidi pre-teen girl to a therapist, remembering the period when she and her younger sister were captured by ISIS. Anyone who was seen crying would be killed, they were told; it turned out to be a
Cinema Scope11 min read
I Lost It at the Movies
“It’s all planned, but it isn’t thought out,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review of A Woman Under the Influence (1974), a nifty bit of critical jiu-jitsu turning John Cassavetes’ much-theorized—and, during Kael’s reign at The New Yorker, much-derided—t
Cinema Scope12 min read
Open Ticket
One of the most surprising things about Ulrike Ottinger’s new documentary Paris Calligrammes is how accessible it is. Some cinephiles may be familiar with Ottinger based on an 11-year period of mostly fictional productions that were adjacent to the N
Cinema Scope14 min read
A Pierce Of The Action
In his Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes identified two elements at work in the act of viewing photographs. On one level was what he labelled the studium, which he defines as a sympathetic interest on the part of the viewer, “a kind of general, enthusias
Cinema Scope11 min read
Movies for Robots
Given the right-wing accelerationism that has marked the response to the pandemic carried out by the governments of my country, state, and city (New York City, where a death toll approaching 25,000 ostensibly constitutes a successful response to the
Cinema Scope15 min read
Reconstructing Violence
There’s a point in nearly every Nicolás Pereda film when the narrative is either reoriented or upended in some way. In the past this has occurred through bifurcations in story structure or via ruptures along a given film’s docufiction fault line. Per
Cinema Scope15 min read
Moving Toward and Away from Horror
It is sadly ironic that the Criterion Collection’s release of the new restoration of Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad (1964)—which is also included as part of the label’s massive box set 100 Years of Olympic Films, 1912–2012—followed closely on the heel
Cinema Scope10 min read
The Home And The World
In a recent article published in advance of the restoration and rerelease of his work, filmmaker and writer Ruchir Joshi detailed the context for creative Indian documentary in the late ’80s, just as he was developing his practice: Independent docume
Cinema Scope9 min read
Paulo Rocha’s Signs of Life
The interesting case of writer-director Paulo Rocha, whose first two features, The Green Years (1963) and Change of Life (1966), are finally widely available in English-subtitled editions after having been restored over seven years ago thanks to the
Cinema Scope8 min read
Chums at Midnight
Presented as a “new” documentary of which Orson Welles is the credited director, Hopper/Welles is at once less and more than whatever would accurately befit that pithy description. On the one hand, the film is, in fact, 130 minutes of Dennis Hopper,
Cinema Scope5 min read
Molto Bene
Carmelo Bene always had very little to do with the provincial history of Italian cinema and its self-congratulatory antics. “Culturally I’m not Italian, but Arab,” he told Jean Narboni in an interview for Cahiers du cinéma in 1968, reclaiming his geo
Cinema Scope9 min read
Film Dada
The most bizarre, entertaining, subversively hilarious short film I’ve seen in this (so far) abbreviated and straitened cinema year has been Ursonate—a dramatized, 24-minute realization of a semimusical performance of Kurt Schwitters’ notorious, Dada
Cinema Scope8 min read
Judged and Found Wanting
Although greeted with almost unanimously positive reviews, the HBO series Silicon Valley—which chronicled the misadventures of a promising tech startup called Pied Piper over 53 halfhour episodes from April 2014 to December 2019—was not one of those
Cinema Scope8 min read
Known Unknowns
No credits ever rupture the cloistered world of Équation a un inconnu (1980), the lone feature directed by the artist Francis Savel, working under the pseudonym “Dietrich de Velsa.” A gay pornographic odyssey through end-of-the-’70s Paris, the film i
Cinema Scope13 min read
Presumptions & Biases
We already know from his imaginary conversations with his very own “Orson” in The Eyes of Orson Welles (2019) that the presumptions of Mark Cousins respect no natural boundaries apart from those of his own hubris. So he doesn’t even need to credit hi
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Inheritance
The role of past insights in (still) present-day struggles is at the heart of The Inheritance, a playful, erudite, and boundary-blurring examination of what performing Black theory, literature, music, and testimony in a contemporary Philadelphia comm
Cinema Scope5 min read
Tenet
“You fight for a cause you barely understand,” Kenneth Branagh’s Blofeldesque villain shouts into a receiver late in Christopher Nolan’s laborious puzzle-box thriller Tenet. Delivered across space and time in a literal game of broken telephone to Joh
Cinema Scope5 min read
Possessor
If it’s true that Brandon Cronenberg sought to cheekily poke fun at his father David’s needle-phobia in his first film (Antiviral, 2011), it feels like parts of Possessor might have been engineered specifically to make my skin crawl. I would say I ha
Cinema Scope5 min read
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
In Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, oafish antihero Nick Dunne owns and manages a bar in his hometown with sister Margot, which they cheekily name “The Bar,” later called “very meta” by the detective investigating Nick for his wife’s murder. The home
Cinema Scope5 min read
First Cow
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow begins with a marriage portrait. Not the conventional image of a bride and groom sharing an ephemeral embrace, but something more peculiar, indeterminate, and ambiguous. A young woman (Alia Shawkat) roaming the brush outsi
Cinema Scope3 min read
Artificial Paradise
As I type this, it’s 2:00pm in northeast Los Angeles, middle of the afternoon: the sky is brown with smoke, air conditioners are walking off the job, and last night I could barely breathe. Yesterday, it was 113 degrees in parts of northeast LA; the m

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