Issue 92- Fall 2022

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Scope
Mark Peranson Vanesa Mazza Peter Mersereau Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman Kayleigh Rosien Jennifer Scott Adrian Kinloch Jack Vermee ■
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
If anyone remembers last issue’s editor’s note from way back when, I did promise you more on Kelly Reichardt, and herein we deliver on that promise (ignore some of the other promises, please, I’m not in control of everything). It’s been quite a banne
Cinema Scope13 min read
Take These Broken Wings
After previously playing a dog person for Kelly Reichardt in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Michelle Williams is now a cat person in Showing Up. Quietly intense in her wardrobe of shapeless earth tones, sullenly poking around Portland in crocs and socks, Wil
Cinema Scope16 min read
Telling the Truth Can Be Dangerous Business
It’s not as if Elaine May wasn’t a beloved figure in American popular culture for most of her life. Her successful pairing with Mike Nichols as an innovative improv comedy team in the late ’50s may have been short-lived—the duo broke up at the height
Cinema Scope10 min read
Can the Centre Hold?
The periphery is always the centre in the films of Adirley Queirós, whether in terms of the people and places at the focus of his attention or the off-centre stylistic means he employs to explore their tribulations, and, by extension, those of Brazil
Cinema Scope18 min read
The Sea Inside
Among a new generation of German filmmakers, Hamburg’s Helena Wittmann is uniquely elemental, even primal, in her concerns. For over a decade, the 39-year-old artist has been exploring the outer reaches of cinematic storytelling through the medium’s
Cinema Scope7 min readWorld
Satan’s Limbo
Film festival politics being what they are, many were surprised when Alexander Sokurov’s new feature, Fairytale, was announced as premiering in competition at Locarno. Sokurov, the grand old master of Russian cinema, has had numerous films debut in c
Cinema Scope13 min read
Timely Circumstances
Anarchic in spirit but formally composed, Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest operates in the dialectical fashion fitting of its era, arriving at an unsuspecting synthesis between such notionally oppositional forces. Indeed, its radical gesture may lie in the r
Cinema Scope7 min read
Myths of New England
In 1969, following the critical success of Nothing But a Man (1964), still his best-known film to date, Michael Roemer made The Plot Against Harry. Centred on Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest), a smalltime racketeer who attempts to rehabilitate himself
Cinema Scope11 min read
The Motern Method
Full disclosure: I am credited as an associate producer on Magic Spot (2022), the latest movie by Matt Farley and Charlie Roxburgh. Lest you think this presents a conflict of interest in writing about them, I assure you that it is only a credit. One
Cinema Scope15 min read
What Is Cinema?
“Who? What? Where? When?” reads one of the advertisements for Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les vampires. Above these words, a question mark cradles the masked head of one Irma Vep (incarnated onscreen by the legendary music-hall performer Musidora),
Cinema Scope9 min read
Finding Fielder
Nathan Fielder’s newest television show, The Rehearsal—which was renewed for a second season at the recent close of its dizzying six-episode run on HBO—is a true comedy, in the sense that it’s really a tragedy. A deeply funny show wrapped around a st
Cinema Scope6 min read
Bologna’s Bounty
There appears to be a consensus that this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna was exceptionally rich—so much so that I concluded that my next column in these pages could be devoted to some of its riches, most of which are already available on DVD o
Cinema Scope5 min read
Peter Brook
“Thank God our art doesn’t last. At least we’re not adding more junk to the museums. Yesterday’s performance is by now a failure. If we accept this, we can always start again from scratch.”—Peter Brook Peter Brook’s dalliance with cinema may have bee
Cinema Scope10 min read
British Sounds
Appearing at charmingly irregular intervals between 1970 and 1987, the 13 volumes of Afterimage comprise an odd, heterodox entry in the history of the “theoretical turn” in film criticism. Less dogmatic than their French counterparts (both literal an
Cinema Scope11 min read
Evidence Visible From A Distance
In The Green Ray (2001), British artist Tacita Dean famously managed to capture on 16mm film the fleeting light that the sun leaves behind right at the moment when it disappears from the horizon. And, because a digital camera used by others at the sa
Cinema Scope5 min read
Aftersun
The image of Paul Mescal lost and losing himself in a crowded, strobe-lit dancefloor is the most haunting leitmotif in Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, a film that would be acutely musical in feel and structure even if it weren’t powered by s
Cinema Scope5 min read
Alcarràs
A pejorative superficially on par with its sister terms Big Pharma and Big Tech, which imply a gadgety reshaping of the natural world, Big Ag looms heavy over the sunny fields of Carla Simón’s acclaimed Alcarràs, which was awarded the Golden Bear at
Cinema Scope4 min read
Enys Men
A woman’s observation that lichen has started to grow on a flower she’s been studying for weeks counts as bold narrative progress in Mark Jenkin’s decidedly low-stakes folk-horror curio, Enys Men. Shot in the same striking, hand-processed 16mm stock
Cinema Scope5 min read
Un Été Comme Ça
Cinema about sex is often enriched by summer settings: escalating heat can place bodies into increasingly erotic orbits as the seeming eternity of canicular days are pit against seasonal ephemerality. While fleeting yet formative attachments are the
Cinema Scope5 min read
Nope
Whatever else you may have heard about Nope, otherwise known as “Not of Planet Earth,” know this: Jordan Peele’s third and most radical movie is his subversive inquiry into Hollywood. On the surface, such a stance is old news. At least as early as Na
Cinema Scope4 min read
Fire Of Love
“Fortune favours the bold.” Pliny the Younger famously ascribed this quote to his uncle, Pliny the Elder, as the latter encouraged an expedition to investigate the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. The Elder, however, was not rewarded by the Roman goddess

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