Issue 94 - Spring 2023

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
THE CINEMA SCOPE TOP 10 OF 2022 1. Pacifiction (Albert Serra) 2. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor) 3. Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg) 4. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) 5. The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sangsoo) 6. Saint
Cinema Scope16 min read
Sentimental Education
“And then sometimes I start lying.” Christian Petzold becomes bored with his own voice during press junkets. “I want to tell new stories,” he confesses with a smile. “For example, I said in one interview that the next movie is about homosexual love o
Cinema Scope18 min read
The Battle of Waterloo
A semi-scenic, mostly horizontal non-metropolis located about 100 kilometres west-southwest of Toronto, the city of Waterloo (pop. 121,000) has earned a reputation as the Silicon Valley of the North—a close-knit network of tech companies and think ta
Cinema Scope9 min read
Imitations of Life
A culmination of Joao Canijo’s oeuvre, the diptych Bad Living/Living Bad premiered at this year’s Berlinale—the former in the international Competition, where it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize, and the latter in the parallel Encounters competition. T
Cinema Scope11 min read
Aether/Ore
Last Things, the latest work from Deborah Stratman, participates in a small but growing trend in experimental filmmaking. Following certain tendencies in contemporary philosophy, Last Things attempts to communicate a radically non-anthropocentric vie
Cinema Scope10 min read
After Tragedy
It is, by now, a given that Angela Schanelec’s films involve insoluble tarrying with opacities at every available level. Consider Blake Williams in Cinema Scope 68: “Like Godard, Schanelec presents us with only enough narrative so that we feel our de
Cinema Scope12 min read
The Nameless World
A film of uncommon warmth and delicacy, Bas Devos’ Here confirms a newfound sense of style and maturity in the Belgian filmmaker’s work that first appeared in the finely tuned nocturne Ghost Tropic (2019). Like that clearly pivotal project, Devos’ fo
Cinema Scope17 min read
The Ecstasy And The Agony
Making a deserved victory lap on the festival circuit around the time of his 80th birthday in September 2022, the ever-prolific and internationally popular Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog, eager to prove that he is not resting on his laurels, came w
Cinema Scope18 min read
In Search Of The Miraculous
J. Hoberman counted Fire Music among the best films of 2021, but his capsule review sings a different tune: “Not a great documentary,” he begins, “but an effective reminder that…” Say no more. I find it almost touching that a hardcore cineaste like H
Cinema Scope5 min read
Lois Patiño’s Samsara
In the modern cinema, the imageless screen assumed a new, decisive importance. No longer there as mere punctuation, or used to simply mark a change of scene, the interstice took on an independent value of its own. To essay its new status, one might c
Cinema Scope8 min read
A Few Signs of Life
The 2023 edition of the Sundance Film Festival wasn’t the worst ever—that would be 2021, when the lousiest movie in the history of major festival-winners, that thing titled Coda, somehow won every prize in sight and never stopped. That annus horribil
Cinema Scope5 min read
Claire Simon’s Notre corps
There’s a violence inherent in modern medicine—not just in the physical intrusions that take place during a surgical procedure, but in the language of medicine itself. Foucault wrote of the “medical gaze,” a way of looking at the patient’s body throu
Cinema Scope8 min read
On Dangerous Ground
I understand the irony of quoting Freud here, of all people, but I’m reminded of a line from Moses and Monotheism: “There was someone in darker times who thought the same as you.” At the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin last summer, curators and
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Self in Shards
“The night he died I was in a north London nightclub, where I took heroin for the first time. I returned to my south London flat the next morning, threw up, and went straight in to work, where someone immediately told me about his death.” This fragme
Cinema Scope10 min read
Digital Releases I Don’t Want & a Few Others That I Do
Who could it be at Vinegar Syndrome Films in the US and/or Powerhouse Films in the UK who decided I was an aficionado of Mexican and/or Canadian wrestling? I haven’t been able to discover if Vinegar Syndrome and Powerhouse are distantly or closely re
Cinema Scope7 min read
Nothing and Everything
The three inaugural releases from Black Zero, a new archival label dedicated to Canadian experimental cinema, are unified by their mystique and uncompromising, adventurous spirit. This new enterprise is particularly exciting because it’s supervised b
Cinema Scope5 min read
Dreaming At The Video Store
Back in the days of dial-up internet, when I would visit websites with names like badmovies.org and stomptokyo.com on my parents’ computer to teach myself the Psychotronic Cinema canon, the one filmmaker who seemed completely without defenders was Al
Cinema Scope5 min read
Un Beau Matin
Something has always struck me as misogynistic about inquisitions into the autobiographical bases of art made by women, as if art about lived experience is less valuable or less imaginative, and that the experiences of women in particular carry less
Cinema Scope5 min read
Infinity Pool
There are few sights more imprinting than Alexander Skarsgard, nearly nude and with a silicone cap and cheek retractor, pouring himself feet-first into polychromatic sludge. He’s almost unrecognizable in his starkness, eyeballs positively juddering w
Cinema Scope5 min read
Knock At The Cabin
Any careful viewing of M. Night Shyamalan’s filmography indicates that the writer-director, now reigning king of his own small fiefdom in what remains of the American movie business, thinks a lot about storytelling. During the period in which he beca
Cinema Scope5 min read
Riceboy Sleeps
Against hazy landscapes of coastal mountain ranges and lilac clusters of alliums, Riceboy Sleeps begins by announcing the arrival of So-young Kim (Choi Seung-yoon). A recently widowed mother to Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang), who was born
Cinema Scope5 min read
Tori Et Lokita
Miike Takashi supposedly believes that there are no bad movies—for him, something of value can be learned from each and every one. I think about that idea often, because I increasingly believe that the definition of a bad film is precisely one that c
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 ADVISORY BOARD Samantha Chater, Jesse Cumming, Alicia Fletcher, Will

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