Issue 95 - Summer 2023

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 WEB DESIGN Adrian Ki
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
Every year, like clockwork, when I get back from Cannes I’m asked, “What were the highlights?” At this point it’s hard to tell as, to quote the future of film criticism ChatGPT, “No matter what cinematic offering graces the screen, the audience is qu
Cinema Scope14 min read
Back to Zero
When a filmmaker’s body of work starts doing the rounds of the cinematheques and museums, it provides an opportunity for re-evaluation or discovery. Even for those of us who are familiar with the cinema of Jean Eustache, the current retrospective, wh
Cinema Scope18 min read
Life Belongs to Us
“There are several good ways of making French films. Italian-style, like Renoir. Viennese, like Ophüls. New Yorker, like Melville. But only Becker was and is French as France, French as Fontenelle’s rose and Bonnot’s gang.” —Jean-Luc Godard, in his o
Cinema Scope14 min read
Master at Work
Paul Schrader’s career has been eclectic enough to encompass biopics of Mishima Yukio, Bob Crane, and Patricia Hearst; adaptations of books by Ian McEwan, Russell Banks, and Nikos Kazantzakis; genre films that meet the expectations of the horror, thr
Cinema Scope26 min read
The Dream’s Dream
“Everybody wants to be in Cannes Première!” —Thierry Frémaux, quoted in Deadline Dear Thierry Frémaux, I hope this letter finds you amidst a rare moment of clarity, for it is high time that someone shed light on the festering hypocrisy that engulfs t
Cinema Scope5 min read
Close Your Eyes
The Cannes Première of Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice’s first feature since Dream of Light (1992) over three decades ago, was immediately followed by a minor controversy. Conspicuously absent from the film’s screening, Erice published an open letter a
Cinema Scope5 min read
Anatomie D’un Chute
Have you ever sat in front of a large poster depicting the human body without its skin? One muscle gets entangled into another, the precision and complexity of their web apparent in the areas that are most crucial for movement, but with the face on t
Cinema Scope5 min read
Fallen Leaves
At 81 minutes, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves was the shortest film in a bloated Cannes competition. It was also among the best, accomplishing more with less (and in less time) than any number of overwrought productions, a notion evidently shared by
Cinema Scope5 min read
La Chimera
“Strange people, the Etruscans,” one character muses in Alice Rohrwacher’s new film. “They believed the flight of birds predicted destiny.” It’s unclear exactly what La Chimera’s protagonist—played with the requisite brooding intensity, and a half-de
Cinema Scope13 min read
Picturers of Flowers
A useful coincidence: I found myself writing this essay in parallel with a brief review of Project for a New American Century, the mid-career survey of artist Josh Kline currently on view at the Whitney Museum. This utility is one of contrast. As Kli
Cinema Scope14 min read
Pedro Costa and Wang Bing, Music and Reality
Among the pantheon of directors whom Pedro Costa habitually invokes when speaking about cinema (Godard, Straub, Ford), the youngest I’ve heard him include, and certainly the only one to have emerged in the 21st century, is Wang Bing. It therefore fel
Cinema Scope5 min read
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema
Cinema Scope19 min read
The Girl and Her Trust
Spring break forever! Waylaid in Washington, DC on a class trip, freshman Lillian (Talia Ryder) pledges allegiance to the flag, blanks on Upton Sinclair’s name, ignores several famous stone memorials, and engages in some rote debauchery: ass-shaking,
Cinema Scope8 min read
Another Space of Reference
“The content of my videotape involves documentary subject matter. The visuals combined with music are the attempt to create the mood of the community…in certain sequences light reflections create forms in space.” —Ulysses Jenkins, “Comment on Video T
Cinema Scope5 min read
Road to Mecca
Feet in Water, Head on Fire debuted earlier this year at the True/False Film Festival and had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs this May in the Markers program. Although this is her first feature-length film as a director, Terra Long has been honing
Cinema Scope8 min read
Pasolini’s Ashes
Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most complex auteurs of 20th-century cinema. In Italy, the scandal-ridden filmmaker (a defendant in court no less than 33 times) is considered a poet first and foremost. Poetry animated, haunted, and cross-contamina
Cinema Scope8 min read
Criticism vs. Fan Fodder
As a lifelong film buff who became a professional film critic in my late twenties, I’ve spent much of my life ever since trying to reconcile these two distinct and, in some respects, conflicting identities. Many of my colleagues seem to regard critic
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Adults
The sharpest gag in Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults, a dramedy about compulsive joke-tellers who do comedy routines to distract from their severe emotional dysfunction, might be the title, which prods at the childhood regression of three nominally adult
Cinema Scope5 min read
Astrakan
The reassurance implicit in the coming-ofage story is that of things foregone, universal, known; the particularities of the passage are shorn of their severity and exigence. The subject is supposed, invariably, to have arrived, their journey ultimate
Cinema Scope5 min read
Beau Is Afraid
Genesis: Noah drunkenly falls asleep naked in his tent. Ham wanders in looking for his father, and instead catches a glimpse of the old man’s penis. When Noah wakes up, humiliated, he punishes his son by cursing his lineage. Henceforth, shame springs
Cinema Scope5 min read
Past Lives
The act of adopting a new name ruptures the past and future, marking the reconstruction of personal mythology to make sense of our surroundings, particularly after seismic life events. In Past Lives, this attempt to introduce a new position in the wo

Cinema Scope

More Issues From Cinema Scope