Tabla de contenidos para Issue 96 - Fall 2023 en Cinema Scope

“…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 conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’ Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions.” —Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus By now, those familiar with the filmography of Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo “Teddy” Williams are aware of his wont to open his films in medias res. His narratives (to the limited extent to which they can be called that) invariably follow low-income twentysomethings from various parts of the world—usually in South America, Africa, and/or…

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-facing as an anti-colonial action movie with the British Empire as the villain, the film imagined a friendship between Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, two real-life freedom fighters from vastly different backgrounds, positioning the upper-caste Raju as the educated senior partner of the duo while Bheem, a lower-caste Muslim, was depicted as something closer to a noble savage. To the film’s critics, this dynamic, if not directly aligned with the far-right Hindutva movement, at the very least refocused history through an upper-caste, Hindu gaze. None of this was particularly apparent to a Western viewer like me, who…

“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 in Die in L.A. (1985), one of the most garishly exhaust-plume-orange and postmodern-hot-pink cop films ever made, if they weren’t the topographical filigree of Nathanael West: a snippet from a beautiful passage in his otherwise coruscating fresco of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust. The proto–West Hollywood patina of West’s momentarily gay wilderness notwithstanding, the reality is that nothing bleeds brighter or smells sweeter under the Southern California sun than fresh bullshit wafting down through the Hollywood Hills. The stuff flourishes in the desert heat, and connoisseurs simply pluck…

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 raised in such an overly protective environment that he had very few friends growing up; despite being painfully awkward and shy, he developed an unhinged passion for sailing, repeatedly steering his father’s boat into Atlantic storms and crashing it more than once. The life-changing event of his youth was a summer adventure exploring Malta and reading Proust; he wrote reams of poetry, and considered art as his path, rather than science. At his ranch in northern New Mexico, he led marathon horseback explorations as far as…

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 paranormal conjuring—and a signifier of the narrative’s social criticism, a smarmy parental directive at a plugged-in youth culture viewed as alienated, disaffected, and immature. It may also be the exhortation of a viewer underwhelmed by Talk to Me’s half-hearted revelations. Protagonist Mia (Sophie Wilde), grieving the anniversary of her mother’s death by suicide, becomes entranced by a video on social media of her friends in a garage experiencing what appears to be supernatural possession: they flail, they vocalize in otherworldly affectations, and their pupils are severely enlarged by the type of dark, distended gaze…

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 years, embarking on a new phase in his career in which contemporary image culture and the sociopolitical absurdities of our time have become both subject of meticulous analysis and object of equally attentive ridicule. Like his Golden Bear–winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), Jude’s latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which recently won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival, feels like it has burst spontaneously from the global unconscious, a space where the real and the virtual mingle with increasing consent. Miles away…

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 sensibilities with respect to the home space. Living in a home together implies domestication, but “feral domesticity” dismantles the civilizing and confining aspects of home life, suggesting a practice that allows wildness and unpredictability inside without attempting to tame it or rob it of its disruptive power. One could compare this with Marilynne Robinson’s classic novel Housekeeping, in the sense that eventually walls no longer demarcate an ideological practice or even a boundary between inside and outside. I thought about this while rewatching the most recent films of Joshua…

“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 recorded 30 years ago. In 1895, Louis Lumière supposedly concluded that the cinema was “an invention without a future.” We’ve been reading the obituaries ever since, and with increasing urgency since the medium celebrated its centenary and went binary on us. Yet the movies keep on coming: good, bad, and indifferent. Here’s one of the good ones: Pictures of Ghosts, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s lovely, relaxed, and personal riff on movies, memory, and the imaginative space conferred by that place we call Cinema. And the rub: while the movies ain’t dead…

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 immediately recognized that Deleuze was working in the tradition opened by André Bazin and the critical lineage of Cahiers du Cinéma. The usual vagaries of translation and interpretation meant that recognition in the English-speaking world came only after a lag, but since the late ’90s the books have gained traction there too, with several academic studies attempting to draw out their concepts in a variety of directions. Ambitious in scope and rich in implications, the Cinema volumes constitute one of the most significant contributions to film theory since Bazin. They cannot, however,…

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 figure of Phaedra is cursed by divine intervention to fall in love again and again with her stepson Hippolytus. It’s not incest—a cold comfort—but still a desire that, in the myth, leads to the destruction of both her and her entire family. In each iteration, though, something changes, and each era gets a version of the story to call its own. This year, the ever-industrious Saïd Ben Saïd has commissioned Catherine Breillat—for the 75-year-old director’s first film since 2013’s autobiographical Abus de faiblesse—not to specifically reimagine the…

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, daring story of an Elizabethan nobleman who one day wakes to find he has inexplicably changed into a woman. As the set is transformed in plain sight, the meta elements dissolving into a concentrated fantasy, the filmmaker’s own voice replaces the actor’s. Unseen, Paul B. Preciado asserts that, in Woolf but perhaps in general, “the first revolutionary metamorphosis is poetry,” which he defines as “the possibility of changing the names of all things.” Preciado, a lexicographer in his own right, makes the case for poetic documentary—which…

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 under the program title Chantal Akerman: Her First Look Behind the Camera. Silent, shot on 8mm, and each about four minutes long, these films were made by Akerman as part of her application to the filmmaking program at Brussels’ Institut Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle, or INSAS, where she was accepted but left after a few months, pronouncing the program stifling. What a strange gift to learn only now of these films, whose existence has been entirely unknown even within the large body of critical work on Akerman. Made a…

“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 Wilde’s source play and the New Testament chapter before it, with the bloody decapitation of John the Baptist—as a primal scene for 20th-century music: a Grand Guignol collision of ripe classicism and atonal modernity that left geniuses and punters alike stupefied. Among the attendees were Gustav Mahler, Giacomo Puccini, and according to legend, a young Adolf Hitler; one note of dissent was sounded by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who snidely predicted that the show would do its composer “a lot of damage.” “Thanks to that damage,” retorted Strauss years…

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 and mistrust. Rather, I shudder at the thought of a brief, innocuous scene near the beginning, in which the indelible protagonist MacReady (Kurt Russell) is busying himself drinking J&B and playing chess against a computer at an Antarctic research station. Barely a minute later, MacReady finds himself checkmated, and hilariously retaliates by pouring his glass into the computer, accompanied by an expletive. It’s a splendid piece of character set-up, still amusing on the umpteenth viewing, and just one example of why I consider The Thing nearly flawless. Nearly, I say,…

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 the passage from childhood, or spatial, as in secluded motels in the middle of road trip destinations. In Denis Côté’s 16th film, however, the liminal spaces are collapsed under one roof by way of creative geography, comprising steady shots revealing walls, hallways, and entrances from various angles. The rooms are mostly vacant, with the occasional chair or trailing sheet of paper that threatens to betray their anonymity. Some more industrial settings are characterized by high ceilings and exposed pipes, while others are more ambiguous as to their previous uses and inhabitants. In her fourth collaboration with Côté,…

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), a beguiling loner with a beautiful soul who is harbouring a trauma that is never fully articulated by the film. Sound familiar? Hirayama is a throwback Wenders Man, resembling, most flatteringly, the characters played by Rüdiger Vogler in the director’s breakout films Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976), and Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis in Paris, Texas (1984). The new film’s balance of natural splendour and urban congestion, as well as the long drives scored by a jukebox of…