Tabla de contenidos para Issue 85 - Winter 2021 en Cinema Scope

Artists who write clearly about their work run a serious risk: that they will be taken at their word. In much of contemporary art this dynamic has descended to the point that the work, the sensuous object, functions as little more than an illustration of the artist’s statement, a vestigial offering to the market. Anxiety over the uncertain presence of an audience demands that whoever arrives in the role of beholder must not walk away without the supposed satisfaction of knowing precisely what they have encountered. I begin here for two reasons. The first is that the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian is the author of one of the great autotheoretical texts, “Montage-at-a-Distance, or: A Theory of Distance” (my quotes from the piece throughout this essay will draw from Julia Vassilieva’s…

With the Vimeo (self-)release of World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime in early October, stalwart Californian independent animator Don Herztfeldt has presented the latest chapter in his ongoing success story. Over 25 years, Hertzfeldt’s career has been constantly building in ambition and scope, and judging from initial reactions, his newest effort—tellingly, his most elaborate as well as his longest standalone work to date, clocking in at 34 minutes—is another winner with critics and audiences. This third foray into the World of Tomorrow universe, which was first entered in 2015 with the eponymous, Oscar-nominated short, also qualifies as Hertzfeldt’s most expansive exercise in sheer storytelling, while still staying true to the lifelong concerns of his work. Unlike World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other…

As the Nouvelle Vague recedes further into the digital sunset, Juliet Berto haunts film history alongside fellow icons like Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, and Anne Wiazemsky. To be sure, an aura of mystery endures in part due to Berto’s death from breast cancer in 1990 at the untimely age of 42. But she was always an enigma to behold, a performer of insinuating beauty and stillness of presence who could turn on a dime from pouty gamine to sultry man-killer. Her legend begins in 1966, when her name was still Annie Lucienne Jamet; she made the acquaintance of Jean-Luc Godard after a screening of Masculin féminin at the University of Grenoble, where she was a member of the campus film society. Berto was a heroine of refusal from her debut…

“I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson Since his legendary 1967 debut, Titicut Follies, the now 90-year-old Frederick Wiseman has completed more than 40 features, which, taken together, constitute a prodigious catalogue of the American experience over the last half-century as revealed through the country’s institutions: its cities and farms, schools and prisons, museums and libraries, courts and legislatures, gyms and theatres, parks and neighbourhoods. Not simply records of cultural customs and institutional procedures, these films incorporate their deceptively plain depictions of regional rituals and diurnal labour into a clear conceptual ordering. Wiseman’s understanding of the world he captures could be summed up by something like the following: the realm of experience may be…

Early in Thomas King’s 2011 book The Inconvenient Indian—a sprawling look at Indigenous cultural history in Canada and the US—the author describes the infamous sculpture The End of the Trail by James Earle Fraser, depicting a depleted man in a feather headdress slumped over his bone-tired horse. This desultory figure became an icon, its silhouette silkscreened onto T-shirts, etched into road signs, and embroidered in the shape of a dreamcatcher that you can buy on eBay. Although it seems like a symbol of an inexorable decline, King suggests that the man may simply be resting, as if he and his horse will rouse again soon and ride off into the future. Director Michelle Latimer’s adaptation of The Inconvenient Indian opens with a similar image: an Indigenous man in a headdress…

“Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction, because it is already there.”—JG Ballard Adaptations are perhaps congenitally bound to disappoint, if only because there arguably cannot be two imaginations that are exactly alike. While the reader’s visualization of a novel tends to be subjectively expressionistic, driven as it is by the “mood” of the text rather than its descriptive qualities (however detailed they may be), cinema can hardly escape its literalizing and collectively mediated nature. Whose version of the book are we really experiencing when watching an adaptation for the big screen? Does comparing the finished cinematic product with its literary source material make any creative sense? Whatever the answer, as far as this piece of…

In his 1892 inaugural address, governor William MacCorkle warned that in the coming years West Virginia would find itself occupying the same “position of vassalage” that Ireland held in relation to England, and for similar reasons: “But the men who today are purchasing the immense areas of the most valuable lands in the State, are not citizens and have only purchased in order that they may carry to their distant homes in the North, the usufruct of the lands of West Virginia, thus depleting the State of its wealth to build grandeur and splendor in other States.” Over the previous century, the Scots-Irish smallholders of Appalachia—a region that stretches more than 2,000 miles from western New York to northern Alabama—had been systematically dispossessed of their land and their makeshift livelihoods…

When I was young, people spoke of immorality.All the things they said were wrong are what I want to be.Over, under, sideways, down, (Hey!)I bounce a ball that’s square and round.When will it end? —The Yardbirds, 1966 Scrutable curio and irresistible objet, Michael Snow’s 1975 “artist’s book” Cover to Cover—a conceptual photo-roman slash slow-motion flipbook with a fabulous Möbiustwist partway through—has been at last rescued from pricey, collector’s-only rarefication: reified and republished in an affordably priced new edition of only 2,500 copies, just in time for Christmas, by those merry stocking-stuffers at Light Industry and Primary Information. Oh, what a lovely thing! Clever and curious, compelling and baffling, both highbrow tease and hippie noodle, Cover to Cover is packed as thick as its title promises with competing conundrums. For starters,…

One of the best known of Steve McQueen’s early video works is Deadpan (1997), a four-minute, 35-second loop in which the artist simultaneously places himself in harm’s way and in film history. The piece is a recreation of the famous Buster Keaton stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) in which the façade of a two-story wooden house falls in on Buster. The performer isn’t crushed by the falling structure because he is standing in the exact position for the window to fall around him, engulfing Keaton in destruction but sparing him as he displays his trademark unflappability. In McQueen’s version, the event is shown from multiple perspectives—profile, ¾ angle, bird’s-eye—as well as being fragmented into close-ups of the artist’s feet, face, and torso. The dangerous stunt is repeated as a…

The “About the Author” section of Armond White’s new critical anthology does not disappoint. In the space of four short paragraphs, White is identified as “esteemed, controversial and brilliantly independent” as well as “The Last Honest Film Critic in America”; his résumé comprises “auspicious tomes” that are “essential for anyone who loves pop culture.” These collected works, including 1995’s actually essential The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World, affirm that “White practically invented the art of music video criticism.” His Lincoln Center seminars on that topic (a few of which are still viewable on YouTube) are memorialized in language borrowed, humorously if not deliberately, from the opening of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” No less than the Misses Morkan’s annual dance, we are assured, these lectures were…

At the end of Kamal Aljafari’s latest film, An Unusual Summer, the Palestinian filmmaker recalls a memory from his childhood, centred on the communal garden outside of his home in the city of Ramlah, a 30-minute drive southeast of Tel Aviv: As a child I spent summerclimbing the fig treefilling straw baskets with green figsbig as apples My sister was more courageousthan me Our bodies itching from the fig leaves My uncle Issa came back one dayI overheard that the Red Crossallowed him to visit his mother It was a hot summerperhaps Augusthe spent every day in the gardencleaning and diggingaround the fig tree Before he left he engraved my nameon the fig tree Years later the bulldozers cameuprooted the garden and tree Aljafari’s father Abedeljalil, who turned six during…

Beginning opens with a sermon on the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac, delivered to a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Georgia’s predominantly Orthodox Christian Caucasus region. Just as the preacher, David (Rati Oneli), starts to expound on its implications regarding belief, the Kingdom Hall is firebombed by unseen attackers, transforming the becalmed sanctuary into a hellish crucible. Taken together with the scene’s violent shift and director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s already evident fixed-frame aesthetic, this invocation of Abraham’s radical leap of faith, which spans the breach between murder and sacrifice, might seem to presage an exploration of religious experience, or a sociocultural study of religious prejudice. But in Kulumbegashvili’s consummately composed feature debut, faith isn’t so much the central subject as it is, well, a beginning—the starting point for a film…

Marking Lav Diaz’s return to Venice four years and two features after winning the Golden Lion for the nearly four-hour The Woman Who Left, Genus Pan has invited easy jokes about its relative brevity by Diaz standards, clocking in as it does at a relatively efficient 156 minutes—even though it is, in fact, a nearly fivefold expansion of the 36-minute Hugaw, Diaz’s contribution to the 2018 omnibus film Lakbayan (Journey), which also featured episodes from Brillante Mendoza and Kidlat Tahimik. This shift in scale has also elicited a shift away from the pointed political critique that has featured in much of Diaz’s recent work: last year’s The Halt has acquired even greater cultural currency in light of the COVID-19 crisis, with its speculative-future concept of a fascist government (a barely…

The films of Nicolás Zukerfeld pit images against words, staging wily games of onscreen meaning-making. Literary miscellanea often spur the ambulatory narratives of the Argentine director’s works: a mysterious letter opens into two Rashomon-esque views of a street encounter in the short La distancia entre las cosas (2008); annotated articles and battered books punctuate the post-breakup meanderings of the characters in the feature-length Winter Comes After Autumn (2016), co-directed by Zukerfeld and his frequent collaborator Malena Solarz; and a page number scribbled on a photocopy brings together a community of cinephiles in the duo’s short, Let Us Now Praise Movies (2017). At a certain point in each film, these incidental connections turn into contests: a voice reads or narrates text over tenuously related visuals, the two mediums wrestling for our…

“I had no problem talking,” Mads Mikkelsen’s buttoned-up history teacher Martin boasts of his first crack at getting buzzed on the job early in Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round. Martin is reporting back to his inner circle of drinking buddies following their recent pact to investigate whether coasting through the day on spirits might rejuvenate their humdrum middle-aged existence, yet he’s also hammering home one of Vinterberg’s genuine, if overstated, insights in this high-concept male weepie: for taciturn men like Martin, Vinterberg suggests, substance abuse can be a boon as well as an impediment to communication. This thwarts the kind of easy sociological insights or pronouncements about masculinity in crisis that both audiences and Martin and his team of amateur scientists are seeking, and it makes what starts off as a…

for RMC 1. It was a total coincidence and yet it felt freighted with meaning: when I returned to the cinema at the end of August after months of suffering with the small screen, the first two films I saw began with crowd scenes. The streets of London were eerily empty as I walked to the Genesis, but as soon as Les misérables (2019) began, the streets of Paris were full. France had won the 2018 World Cup and the city was alive with celebration. The image of so many young people of colour waving so many French flags was a succinct and spectacular way for director Ladj Ly to stage the problem of national belonging and its relation to race, coloniality, and inequality. Since the Revolution, the body politic…

“I am very happy to accept this award in the spirit in which the screenplay was written—which is to say, in the absence of Orson Welles,” snarks Gary Oldman’s Herman Mankiewicz in the recreated newsreel that caps off Mank, as he receives the Best Screenplay Oscar he acrimoniously shared with Welles for Citizen Kane (1941). It’s hardly necessary to point out that, while Welles himself (as capably impersonated by English actor Tom Burke) is only an intermittent physical presence in David Fincher’s film (which he directed from a decades-old script by his late father Jack Fincher), the entire enterprise exists under his shadow. Welles aficionado Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote of “how mythical and ideological a creature Welles remains [as a cultural figure], a site for the acting out of various…

“Young things with a talent for living” was how F. Scott Fitzgerald famously defined the flapper, apropos of Joan Crawford’s star-making performance in MGM’s Our Dancing Daughters, which was released to much fanfare in 1928. The late silent era saw flapper culture reach its apex in Hollywood, with dozens of high-profile films spotlighting this media darling of the age. In addition to the Crawford vehicle, there was the first, non-musical version of Chicago (1927), produced (and reportedly ghost-directed) by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Phyllis Haver as Roxie Hart; Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927), with Evelyn Brent as the immortal “Feathers” McCoy; It (1927), partially directed by an uncredited Sternberg, which earned the vivacious Clara Bow the iconic nickname that was later transferred to any number of up-and-coming starlets; and…

Inertia implies stillness, but more precisely it means that without intervention any body resists change. The word conjures ceaseless motion as much as it does stasis—someone who cannot go on, or someone who can do nothing else. Something of this semantic tension imbues The Calming, writer-director Song Fang’s ascetic second feature. Lin (Qi Xi), also a filmmaker, neither works nor rests but drifts, boarding buses and trains, wandering verdurous forests and lamplit, unpeopled streets, across Tokyo, Niigata, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Nanjing. Now and then she sojourns with loved ones or promotes her latest film about trees: life forms that likewise commingle rootedness and sway. Images of trees bookend The Calming: first a digital still projected onto a gallery wall—Lin asks the technicians to dim the brightness, a cue to…

In a year when even the most perfunctorily political film has been deemed newly relevant, it’s a 58-minute observational documentary from 2007 that, by quietly surveying the United States’ progressive past, points most perceptively to the struggle that has faced the American Left since long before 2020. A history of violence and oppression told entirely through the sites and historical markers that stand in tribute to America’s fallen and forgotten revolutionaries, John Gianvito’s Profit motive and the whispering wind reiterates a hard truth about our world: that socially inclined thought is rarely embraced, and that the minds and voices of those fighting for real change are often only appreciated by an engaged few in the rearview mirror. To the latter point, Profit motive—like each of Gianvito’s films since coming to…

It was easy to miss the publication earlier this year of experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky’s second book, a volume of photographs entitled Eclogues: Letters and Correspondence. Printed privately by Dorsky as a gift for friends, Eclogues was self-distributed by its author, by hand and mail, as though it was itself one of the eponymous letters. A smaller printing was simultaneously made available as a limited edition, for sale through his New York gallery. Although almost wordless—save its title, dedication, and colophon pages—Eclogues’ unnumbered sequence of images speak revealingly to central ideas of Dorsky’s filmmaking. In many ways it is also a fitting work of art for this time of plague. Those who know and admire Dorsky’s 16mm films will recognize a profound “correspondence” between Eclogues and his cinema, beginning with…

A passage in Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland describes the unlikely birth and hard death of the life of Empire, a mining town in northwest Nevada. “In 1923,” Bruder writes, “laborers established a tent colony on the site of what later became the town. By some accounts, Empire boasted the longest continuously operating mine in the country, excavating a claim first established by Pacific Portland Cement Company in 1910. On December 2, 2010, that history came to a sudden stop. Workers in steel-toed shoes and hard hats gathered in the community hall at 7:30 am for a mandatory meeting. Mike Spihlman, the gypsum plant’s soft-spoken manager, delivered a grim edict to a room full of stunned faces: Empire was shutting down. Everyone had until June 20 to leave. First came silence,…

In the antepenultimate episode of The Sopranos, “The Second Coming,” Anthony Jr., depressed, unemployed, and newly single, confines himself to his bedroom reading news about the Middle East. Looking for a way to cheer him up, his sister Meadow enters and tries to start conversation about a movie. “I was just watching Borat on cable. You can watch that thing 50 times, and it’s still hilarious.” In reply, a tortured, expressionless A.J. mumbles one of the best lines in the series: “It wasn’t fair to the people involved.” Through A.J.’s depressive, black-pilled outlook, the final season of The Sopranos staked itself most clearly as a fable of contemporary American decline told through the fortunes of its unhappy Families. Like that series, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation…