Table of contents for Issue 76 - Fall 2018 in Cinema Scope

The phony magazine cover glimpsed in the early moments of Her Smell may not have the same heady metatextual allure as that of so many journals invented out of whole cloth and newsprint for narrative purposes, like the must-read issues of Dorgon and Kill Weekly on the newsstands in Blade Runner (1982) or the original Spy magazine that employed Mike Connor in The Philadelphia Story (1940). But the sight of the three members of the film’s fictional band Something She getting giddy and goofy as they show off their first SPIN cover—complete with the none-more-1994 cover lines “Beck: This Loser’s Not Weeping” and “London’s Rave Scene: Welcome to the Jungle”—does serve a few purposes besides inducing a nostalgic pang in former subscribers. Along with the stage sequence of the band…

An eternal mystery surrounds the steely German-tinged name John M. Stahl. Undeniably a director of note, his work remains something of a secret, as does much of his life, with himself being not the most reliable narrator. Stahl was born in Baku to Russian Jews in 1896 as Jacob Morris Strelitsky, and his parents left the empire to settle in New York City, bringing him along as a child. Electing to call himself John Malcolm Stahl, he entered the film industry in the ’10s, likely debuting as a director in 1917 with The Lincoln Cycle, although many sources also credit him with a 1914 work for writer-producer Judge Willis Brown called A Boy and the Law. For most of Stahl’s life and for years after his death, many sources credited…

China’s growing economic clout and rising prominence in world affairs can help illuminate some essential if unflattering traits of the business we call show. Not even a decade ago, any mention of China was usually made in relation to the draconian censorship filmmakers there had to face, often at the expense of their own artistic freedom, if not worse. As the country’s finances improved, and its box office became something to be courted at the cost of self-censorship, the word “China” in trade magazines started being associated with much nobler notions. Suddenly, what had once been a veritable hellhole for freedom-loving directors became the dream co-production partner, a place where the inauguration of the Qingdao film studios in 2013, a mere $7.9 billion project, attracted the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio,…

I only first met Jodie Mack—one of the most imaginative, hardest-working, and all-around best filmmakers in the game, experimental or otherwise—two Septembers ago. It was a Sunday, the day before I turned 31, and the night ended with her leading the entire clientele of a crowded pub in Toronto’s Little Italy to sing me “Happy Birthday” just after midnight. Many of the people there were strangers to her, and in some sense I was, too, which of course didn’t faze her in the least. Mack is, after all, one of contemporary avant-garde cinema’s greatest proponents of fellowship and happiness in the cinema space—bulldozing borders one frame, fabric swatch, paper clipping, and song at a time. “For the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the…

Taking place in a California not unlike the one we know, comedian and Coup frontman Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry to Bother You takes the repellent fantasies of our late-capitalist, fake-news world—one that is constantly on the brink but never ending—at their word. In this surreal vision of Oakland, slavery has become the only option, white fantasies are the only way to get ahead, and the invisible empires of tech giants are built upon piles of all-too-human bodies. In the face of this entirely accepted madness, Riley—a self-declared communist who has proclaimed that Sorry to Bother You is a communist film—is adamant that revolution is the next and only logical step, one that most of us are too timid to take. But a revolution cannot succeed if its foundations are…

Though not primarily known as a filmmaker, the great earthworks artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) had cinematic inclinations, implicit and explicit. A line or two of pointed film criticism from his journals can be found in his collected writing, published a few years after his untimely death, but it was his more Borgesian musings on the medium and its relation to history that today retain their zing: “What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave.” “Changes, circles spinning/can’t tell the finish from the beginning”—Moby Grape In a sense, Smithson did just that. His major film (in title and in function) is synonymous with his…

To begin, a question: What exactly is La Flor? It’s a pertinent query, albeit one with no easy answer, so let’s break it down. The first thing to know about La Flor is that, yes, it’s a 14-hour-long film—868 minutes to be exact, including intermissions and what must be a record breaking 40-minute end-credits sequence. But these talking points also obscure much of what makes Mariano Llinás’ ten-year passion project such an approachable—dare I say accessible—feat of populist filmmaking. For starters, La Flor is not a film in the traditional sense: rather, it’s a number of films, all but one of which happens to be rather traditional. Comprised of six discrete episodes, La Flor is what we might call an anthology film, in that a number of individual narratives, each…

The opening montage of the Catherine the Great biopic The Scarlet Empress (1934)—the fifth of six films made by Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich at Paramount between 1930 and 1935, which have recently been released as a box set from the Criterion Collection—sets the tone for the duo’s most outrageous and gleefully perverse collaboration. With an eye for the salacious, Sternberg depicts the reign of the czars in 18th-century Russia as a torture garden, with women the primary victims. Featuring some startling glimpses of nudity (all the more startling given that the film premiered a few months after the creation of the Production Code Administration), the montage shows women being burned at the stake, their heads rolling off executioners’ blocks, and their bodies tumbling out of iron maidens (one…

The latest rejiggering of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) will be premiering soon after this issue hits the stands, and while it doesn’t exactly put the franchise founder front and centre—he’s ceremoniously included in the credits as an executive-producing éminence grise—it nonetheless attests to the way that Carpenter’s influence continues to shape genre trends during this new heyday of horror. It’s also fitting that this fresh disinterment of Carpenter’s signature property arrives during a powerful resurgence of pop-cultural interest in the work of the director’s literary contemporary Stephen King, with the second “chapter” of last year’s killer-klown blockbuster It (2017) set for release in 2019 and the new television series Castle Rock (titled after, and set in, the fictional Maine burg that features in so many of King’s stories) debuting this…

A shot of the azure sky, luminous and expansive, is how Godard opens his “second first film” Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), which was released two decades after the start of the nouvelle vague and serves as the effective zero point of so-called “late Godard,” a period that now spans close to four decades. Although seen as Godard’s return to narrative filmmaking after his post-1968 Dziga Vertov period, the film might better be considered the first in a generative period of experimentation that would culminate with Toutes les histoires (1988), the first chapter of the director’s magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma. Opaque, highly elliptical, obscure on the level of story and stubbornly resistant to categorization—qualities that would only intensify in later years—Godard’s variegated ’80s output can nonetheless be succinctly…

“Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft do go together,” Jan-Christopher Horak states flatly in a 2016 interview that Criterion has included as a supplement on their recently released edition of the latter film (#908 to its partner’s #907 in the label’s sequential spine numbering). In this, Horak simply affirms an already (and deservedly) widespread conviction that these two films by G.W. Pabst, released less than a year apart (1930 and ’31, respectively), are virtually a continuous text. Both centre on the legacy of the First World War and the scars it left on the German and European mind. Both make explicit calls for cooperation and reconciliation across the Rhine: the cry of the wounded French soldier to his German counterpart at the end of Westfront—“Comrades, not enemies”—is realized in the postwar, based-on-fact…

Unless you count the brief appearances of an angry young drug addict with a gun and three glad-handing Texas oilmen who offer the rambling, gifted troubadour Blaze Foley a shady deal to record on their new label, Zephyr—aptly named, since the whole venture’s lifespan is that of a hot wind in the desert—there are no bad guys in Blaze, the movie version of Foley’s life directed by Ethan Hawke and co-written by Hawke and Foley’s widow Sybil Rosen. This movie isn’t interested in conflict, protagonists, heroes, dramatics, or any of the other categories that typically fill up the soggy insides of cinema’s worst genre, the biopic. The immediate reason for this refusal to dramatize stems, simply, from Foley’s songs themselves, most of them ballads, love songs, poems of saudade on…

On the basis of Les démons (2015) and his latest film Genèse—I haven’t caught up yet with Copenhague, a Love Story (2016) or his documentaries—Saint-Apagit-born writer-director Philippe Lesage is already one of the strongest stylists in Canadian cinema, cultivating, in collaboration with the gifted cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni, a distanced, gliding camera style that echoes of contemporary fest-circuit heavyweights (including Haneke and Östlund) but imbued with its own palpable aesthetic and dramatic rationale. Both Les démons and Genèse—which premiered in Locarno in August before seemingly being bypassed in favour of who knows what by TIFF—have been reliably described by reviewers as semi-autobiographical coming-of-age stories: studies, respectively, of adolescent fear (via Les démons’ horror-inflected atmospherics) and desire, in Genèse’s parallel goodbye-first-love narratives. This taxonomy is true enough, but it’s also reductive. There…

When Goethe wrote his Faust, adapting the German legend about a scholar who makes a pact with the Devil to attain total knowledge, could he have foreseen how incisive his indictment of human hubris would be across epochs? How durable his critique of the Enlightenment would be, not only for his age of skepticism but also our own? In cinema, which benefited from pre-established knowledge in theatre, poetry, and prose, the Faust legend occupies a privileged place, ranging from Murnau’s indelible late-silent masterpiece to Sokurov’s Golden-Lion-winning reimagination of versions by Goethe and Thomas Mann in 2011. As early as 1903, Edwin S. Porter and Alice Guy-Blaché had adapted the supernatural tale, using its stable of fantastical imagery—demons and dames, murder and lust—as a subject of their films. Drawing inspiration from…

It’s understandable why Ying Liang would cautiously describe his latest film, A Family Tour, as only “semi-autobiographical.” There are, indeed, marked differences between him and his protagonist, a dissident Chinese filmmaker called Yang Shu travelling to Taiwan to meet her mother for the first time in years. For starters, his onscreen protagonist is a woman; unlike her, Ying hasn’t met his parents in person since his forced relocation from China to Hong Kong in 2012, when the Chinese authorities declared him persona non grata for pointing out the corruption of the country’s legal system and public security apparatus in When Night Falls. Most importantly, the fictional Yang is dour and depressed. Ying, however, seems to radiate positivity at every turn. Barely had we sat down for our conversation in a…

We need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that Damon Packard doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Of course it seems utterly random and perhaps even a bit ill-fitting to begin an analysis of one of America’s most truly independent cine-anarchists with a paraphrase by Marco Rubio, one of America’s most craven, obsequious politicians. Then again, why not? There’s an exhilarating randomness, a magpie’s collection of materials that characterizes every Packard film, bits and pieces from the ugliest corners of the media landscape and the deepest recesses of a pop-addled memory. But more than this, someone like Rubio exemplifies the repugnant machine-world that is constantly bearing down on Packard’s world like an all-enveloping fog. Whether it’s made manifest as corporate capitalism, our militarized über-state, or…

Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw has long been interested in cinematic trips, most often of the psychedelic variety. Across a number of film and video shorts, installations, performances, and photo works, as well as a notable parallel career as a musician, Shaw has repeatedly returned to questions of altered states and euphoria, whether chemically induced or otherwise. Born in North Vancouver, Shaw has lived and worked for the past decade in Berlin, and recently completed the final instalment of his since-dubbed Quantification Trilogy, three films that stand as the artist’s most ambitious and conceptual body of work to date. The Quantification Trilogy brings together several overarching concerns that have emerged throughout Shaw’s career, most notably an interest in science, faith, documentary, dance, and euphoria. Dynamic, enigmatic, complex, and beautiful, Shaw’s works…

Christian Petzold’s progressive drift away from realism gathers pace in Transit, another melodrama of impossibility and despair that unfolds in a hyper-constructed amalgam of past and present as unstable as it is seamless. Yet the deliberately unresolved tension between ’40s Marseille and today is hardly the only element of slippage in the German director’s typically astute adaptation of Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, as frictions of all kinds abound: between literature and cinema; between her ideas and his; between the explicit and the unsaid. As Transit begins, the police are already going door-to-door in Paris, yet Georg (Franz Rogowski) has no plans to leave, unlike his friend Paul (Sebastian Hülk), who is set to depart the next day. Paul asks Georg to deliver two letters to a…

The debut fiction feature by Ognjen Glavonic is the second time that the Serbian writer-director, who lived through the Yugoslav wars as a child, has explored the same shocking incident from the time of the Kosovo conflict. In his feature-length documentary Depth Two (2016), he mixed spoken testimonies from those involved with eerily empty images of the sites where the crimes occurred to reveal the stories behind a mass grave in the Belgrade suburbs. While The Load (which screened in this year’s Quinzaine) deals with one of those threads in its tale of truck drivers who are paid by the Serbian government to ferry mysterious, unspecified cargo from Kosovo to Belgrade, it differs from its documentary twin in that here the revelation of the crime is less the subject than…