Issue 83 - Summer 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
When the history of 2020 is written, if we make it that far, the disruption of the usual mechanisms of exhibition, production, and distribution of cinema will (rightly) appear as a footnote, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There are more importa
Cinema Scope32 min read
The Land Demands Your Effort
Set in the Shiotani Basin, a short train ride from Kyoto, the long-awaited return of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström, a decade following The Anchorage, patiently accompanies Shiojiri Tayoko over five seasons in her small village of 47 predominantly el
Cinema Scope16 min read
DAU. Diary & Dialogue
At the press conference for the premiere of DAU. Natasha at this year’s Berlinale, director Ilya Khrzhanovsky pre-empted questions regarding the controversial methods involved in the realization of his 14-year passion project—collectively known as DA
Cinema Scope15 min read
The Limits of Control
About a third of the way into Med Hondo’s stunning 1979 musical West Indies ou les nègres marrons de la liberté, at which point the narrative has located itself at some unspecified time in the mid-20th century, a group of West African men and women b
Cinema Scope19 min read
As If We Were Dreaming It
Christian Petzold returns to the present and bids a full farewell to realism in Undine, a fantasy-tinged, modern-day fairy tale that grafts the vicissitudes of Berlin city planning onto an uncharacteristically chirpy romance. Although fate is still p
Cinema Scope7 min read
Traces of Desire
About six months ago, France was having a real Robert Kramer moment. A complete retrospective at the Cinématheque française in November 2019 was accompanied by an announcement from the Paris-based distributor Re:voir that they would be releasing an “
Cinema Scope12 min read
In Search of the Female Gaze
It’s no coincidence that Midge wears glasses. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Barbara Bel Geddes’ character is a woman who knows too much—and, therefore, a woman who can never capture the romantic interest of the hero, Scottie (James Stewart).
Cinema Scope8 min read
Have It Your Own Way
“I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here…We’d laugh right back at the lot of y
Cinema Scope9 min read
Live(stream) and In Person
Zia Anger’s My First Film is a lot of things: a cinema-performance art hybrid, a confrontation with traditional modes of film production and distribution, a radical reclamation of the narrative regarding what it means to be a female artist, and, now,
Cinema Scope13 min read
The Math of Love Triangles
The most arresting image in the new BBC Studios series Trigonometry (airing in the US this summer on HBO Max and in Canada on CBC Gem) comes in the fifth episode, when restaurateur Gemma (Thalissa Teixeira), in the middle of a difficult Nordic honeym
Cinema Scope18 min read
Six Impossible Colours (Out Of Space)
One of last year’s major comebacks, Color Out of Space heralds the belated return to fiction features for the South African-born director Richard Stanley, who, justly celebrated for his early triumphs Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), was fired
Cinema Scope10 min read
The People United Will Never Be Defeated
Every day, a brief tweet with a time and a URL: it’s usually for 7:00 pm Berlin time, 1:00 pm in eastern North America. At almost precisely 7:00 pm, we click, and a 9:16 aspect ratio window opens. The view, about ten degrees left from perpendicular,
Cinema Scope9 min read
Ozark’s America And The Rise Of The Longform
“Why do I have this feeling that it’d be better off if you were dead?” Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) says this to Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) in their first encounter inside a public-park washroom in Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams’ longform series, Oz
Cinema Scope9 min read
Socially Distant
First things first: an online film festival is weird, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. Naturally, one misses the enveloping concentration of the big screen and the dark room, no matter how much we may try to approximate that environment in
Cinema Scope10 min read
Diverse Kinds of Do-it-Yourself Subterfuge, Mainly American
Well before the coronavirus pandemic kicked in, I’d already started nurturing a hobby of creating my own viewing packages on my laptop. This mainly consists of finding unsubtitled movies I want to see, on YouTube or elsewhere, downloading them, track
Cinema Scope5 min read
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
One May evening, I dipped into a Twitch stream in search of a fresh current. Within the weird undertow of quarantine, there is a new lustre to these live events, which mark unfixed days with a fixed hour—a dupe for the transient communion gone from c
Cinema Scope4 min read
Blood Quantum
The hook is intriguingly straightforward: in Blood Quantum, an infectious zombie disease spreads through the world, save for the residents of a Mi’kmaq community along the Québec-New Brunswick border who appear to be immune to the undeadly virus. In
Cinema Scope4 min read
The Vast Of Night
What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Set in the ’50s, when Cold War paranoia and Space Race aspirations loomed large in America, The Vast of Night centres on a mysterious radio signal that hangs in the air over the fictional small town of Cayuga, New Mexic
Cinema Scope5 min read
S01e03
What Fredric Jameson once identified as the cultural logic of late capitalism—“the waning of historicity,” i.e., the demise of popular modernist movements and the installation of a stagnant, homogeneous culture industry that recycles old forms while
Cinema Scope3 min read
No President
Political filmmaker and pageant master Jack Smith’s final feature, No President—created and variously incarnated while Richard Nixon took office and the ’60s came to a close (and left, like all of his films after 1963’s Flaming Creatures, intentional

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