Issue 90 - Spring 2022

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 ASSISTANT EDITOR Peter Mersereau CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman PRODUCTION AND MARKETING MANAGER Kayleigh Rosien FINANCIAL MANAGER Je
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
1. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze) 2. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) 3. Drive My Car (Hamaguchi Ryusuke) 4. France (Bruno Dumont) 5. In Front of Your Face (Hong Sangsoo) 6. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Hamaguchi Ry
Cinema Scope12 min read
Tales From The Unama’ki Hospital
Intense duets are at the centre of Ashley McKenzie’s cinema. Her 2016 debut Werewolf portrayed a pair of emotionally conjoined drug users, juxtaposing devotion and addiction as two sides of the same coin. In her follow-up, Queens of the King Dynasty,
Cinema Scope11 min read
I Know My Taste
In a short catalogue note on Joyce Wieland’s La raison avant la passion (1969), Hollis Frampton described this trans-Canadian epic as a film “about the pain and joy of living in a very large space: in fact, in a continent.” Six years later, James Ben
Cinema Scope14 min read
Change of Consciousness
Is there a film book more influential than Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art? Just reading the opening paragraph reminds one of the urgency and curiosity it transmits to the reader—now, here’s a mission statement, but the mission is to make you t
Cinema Scope16 min read
Pointing the Moral Index Finger
In “The Present Absence,” his introductory essay for the Austrian Film Museum’s English-language monograph dedicated to Ruth Beckermann, Nick Pinkerton pinpoints the central question that has animated much of Beckermann’s work as a filmmaker, writer,
Cinema Scope14 min read
Not On The Lips
Of all this year’s Berlinale prizes, Claire Denis’ Silver Bear for Best Director was the one seemingly every cinephile could agree on. With the win—incredibly, Denis’ first prize from any of the major international festivals—the 75-year-old French di
Cinema Scope12 min read
Bravo, Richie
Depending who you ask, Rimini will have varying connotations. For cinephiles, the Adriatic city is Fellini’s birthplace, a (reconstructed) setting in his films à clef I Vitelloni (1953) and Amarcord (1973). For Germans and Austrians of the boomer gen
Cinema Scope9 min read
Waking Dreams
In all art there seems to be some principle of recurrence related to the repetitions of nature that conditions our sense of time—not just the passage of the seasons, but also the cycles of light and darkness, of waking and sleeping life. The films of
Cinema Scope8 min readWorld
Older Than the Trees
In August 2020, Palestinian artist Jumana Manna conceived of a multi-part online screening program for e-flux titled Take Me Back. Highlighting works by both contemporary and historical filmmakers and artists, the series served to examine late 20th-
Cinema Scope10 min read
Don’t Look Now
Before he became a 21st-century Stanley Kramer, cited by GQ in a recent profile as “the grown-up in the room,” Adam McKay played the more comfortable role of American comedy’s slouchy, politically savvy older brother. Improbable as his progressive-da
Cinema Scope9 min read
Out Of The Blue And Into The Black
Undoubtedly, the most referenced colour in the history of art has been the colour blue; it is perhaps also the most magnificent. From its invention by the ancient Egyptians, to the painted parchment in medieval Psalters, through Renaissance brocades
Cinema Scope7 min read
The New New Hollywood
Reading Adam Nayman’s recent books Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks and David Fincher: Mind Games, you feel like you are coming into a discussion already underway—which, essentially, you are. This is just Nayman being realistic, because while it is
Cinema Scope5 min read
No Innovation without History
Commissioned and edited by filmmakers and scholars Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada is a necessary and overdue contribution to Canadian film history. Rather than make large, encompassing claims abo
Cinema Scope1 min read
New By The Author Of ‘From Walt To Woodstock: How Disney Created The Counter-culture”
“Written with his customary verve and eye for telling details, Douglas Brode’s Disneyanity is a useful compendium that guides its reader through both classic and lesser known films. Brode’s argument that Disney ‘magic’ has represented a kind of liber
Cinema Scope8 min read
Print the Legend
One time I was leaving Jack Ford’s house because I had a present I wanted to deliver to John Wayne. I told Ford, “It’s Duke’s birthday, I’m going over to give him a book.” “Eh?” he said. Sometimes Ford liked to pretend he was hard of hearing. So I re
Cinema Scope10 min readWorld
Circumstantial Encounters
My pandemic home-viewing choices are invariably and inescapably matters of chance and accident—basically, what turns up and when. In different ways, all of the dozen items discussed below are examples of what I mean. 1. On its own initiative, Icarus
Cinema Scope8 min read
Spaceship Down
Sundance is the only major film festival in at least North America, and quite possibly the world, to create a section dedicated to the experimental/avant-garde and then turn around and destroy that section’s mission. The section is called New Frontie
Cinema Scope5 min read
A Little Love Package
An antidote as much as a film, Gastón Solnicki’s A Little Love Package is a time(less) capsule that offers refuge from the onslaught of a reality that is becoming increasingly catastrophic, at least for those who have been lucky enough to reside far
Cinema Scope5 min read
A Flower In The Mouth
Screening in this year’s Berlinale Forum, Éric Baudelaire’s unique take on Luigi Pirandello’s 1923 short play The Man with the Flower in His Mouth assumes the form of a diptych: the first part is an observational documentary of Bloemenveiling Aalsmee
Cinema Scope5 min read
La Vie Moderne
Louis Feuillade occupies a singularly peculiar place in film history. Perhaps this is because for several generations of cinephiles, his work has always seemed just out of reach. His five-part, 330-minute serial Fantômas (1913) was, for many years, f
Cinema Scope5 min read
Nitram
Shortly before the close of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, word began to circulate that a very successful, cash-flush US distributor had snagged the rights to Nitram, the fifth feature film by Australia’s Justin Kurzel. Although the film didn’t seem
Cinema Scope5 min read
Flux Gourmet
“I do wonder sometimes if you are perpetuating an archetype of epicurean toxicity with all this culinary hysteria,” muses Jan (Gwendoline Christie) to her latest group of artists in residence at the Sonic Catering Institute, the cultural institution
Cinema Scope5 min read
Air Doll
Often praised for their humanist poetics, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s most laureled films have been novelistic family dramas that locate startling profundities within the seemingly ordinary, even banal textures of everyday life, a naturalism that the directo
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Tale Of King Crab
Where do stories begin, and how and why do they endure? In The Tale of King Crab, directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis expand and deflate, by slyly cinematic means, upon a tradition of racconti popolari and fiabe. The new century has see

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