Issue 96 - Fall 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
First, another clarification for those who might have missed the nuance, or are not as inside baseball as I am: in the last issue the “open letter” from “Lisandro Alonso” to a certain French film festival director was obviously a ChatGPT joke—and as
Cinema Scope22 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
Workingman’s Death
Where for many filmmakers the pandemic discouraged production or curbed creativity, it only seems to have inspired Radu Jude. Always impossible to peg, the prolific 46-year-old Romanian director has grown especially wily and provocative in recent yea
Cinema Scope8 min read
First Looks
The Fondation Chantal Akerman and Cinematek, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, have made available a remarkable find: four early shorts by the Belgian-born filmmaker, produced in 1967 when she was only 17 years old, which are now being exhibited und
Cinema Scope22 min read
Outside In
“…is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’ This conjunc
Cinema Scope12 min read
Savagery Begins at Home
A few years ago, I interviewed the artmaking team of Dani and Sheilah ReStack, a married couple with children who described their work as based on the concept of “feral domesticity.” It’s a conceptual oxymoron, since the two words suggest opposite se
Cinema Scope16 min read
The Phantom Of The Opera
“Nothing more Satanic or artistic has been seen on the German stage,” wrote one critic of the premiere of Salome in Ganz, Austria in 1891. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross describes the unveiling of Richard Strauss’ opera—which climaxed, like Oscar Wi
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Arc of the Moral Universe
Mostly drowned out amidst enormous international acclaim, the scattered dissenting voices that greeted last year’s Telegu blockbuster RRR tended to place its historic fantasia within the disquieting context of present-day Hindu nationalism. Front-fac
Cinema Scope10 min read
Afterlife
“All the cinemas went extinct,” observes a street vendor who used to sell movie posters and lobby cards behind the film distribution centre in downtown Recife, Brazil, before the bottom dropped out of the market. The kicker: this interview was record
Cinema Scope21 min read
The King is Dead, Long Live the King
Whenever I rewatch John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), I am overcome by unspeakable dread. And not because of the film’s hugely effective horror sequences or its more philosophical aspect of terror, a despairing view of humanity torn apart by paranoia
Cinema Scope15 min read
Cork Soaker
“The path was silver, grained with streaks of rose-gray, and the walls of the canyon were turquoise, mauve, chocolate and lavender. The air itself was vibrant pink.” Those might be production notes in the script margins of William Friedkin’s To Live
Cinema Scope12 min read
Deleuze and Criticism
It has now been four decades since Gilles Deleuze published his major two-volume treatise on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In France, where the books were reportedly something of a publishing sensation, commentators
Cinema Scope7 min read
Flowers Of The Mind
“And here is observed one further curious parallel between the visual and the musical overtone: it cannot be traced in the static frame, just as it cannot be traced in the musical score. Both emerge as genuine values only in the dynamics of the music
Cinema Scope7 min read
Reassessments
One advantage to growing older is having more opportunities to reassess and reflect. This isn’t only a matter of understanding and/or judging what one sees: it’s also a matter of evaluating why one has seen certain films and not seen certain others.
Cinema Scope5 min read
L’été Dernier
It’s always the old scandals that we return to, unresolved problems in need of resolution. From the ancient Greek tragedies of Euripides to the high school canon via Racine through the more recent explosion of interest in the plays of Sarah Kane, the
Cinema Scope5 min read
Mademoiselle Kenopsia
Mademoiselle Kenopsia is centrally concerned with liminality—those spaces that oscillate between familiar and surreal, enduring in transitional stasis. The dimensions of transition can be temporal, as in sun-bleached plastic jungle gyms that evoke th
Cinema Scope6 min read
Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s first name was Julius—the same name as his father, from whom he grew alienated as a teenager, and his relegation of it to an initial was one of the ways that Oppenheimer shied away from anything smacking of Jewishness. He was
Cinema Scope6 min read
Orlando, Ma Biographie Politique
A boy in a blue track jacket and Victorian collar sits on a stepladder, surrounded by production equipment. While a stage tech drags a snowy backdrop behind him, the actor reads from the book in his lap. It is Orlando by Virginia Woolf—the knotty, da
Cinema Scope5 min read
Perfect Days
Is Wim Wenders back? If he is, I’m not sure it’s such a good thing. Perfect Days, the tenth film by the German director to compete at Cannes, is a working-class yarn about the pleasantly banal routines of a toilet cleaner named Hirayama (Yakusho Koji
Cinema Scope5 min read
Talk To Me
The title of this first feature from Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou (a.k.a. YouTube creators RackaRacka) is at once a quote from the film’s diegetic world—dialogue spoken repeatedly by the film’s teenage characters in their paranor

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