Cinema Scope

1. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze) 2. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) 3. Drive My Car (Hamaguchi Ryusuke) 4. France (Bruno Dumont) 5. In Front of Your Face (Hong Sangsoo) 6. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Hamaguchi Ryusuke) 7. Annette (Leos Carax) 8. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven) 9. The Tsugua Diaries (Maureen Fazandeiro, Miguel Gomes) 10. The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg) Special mentions: The Card Counter (Paul Schrader); The Girl and the Spider (Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher); A Night of Knowing Nothing (Payal Kapadia); Petite maman (Céline Sciamma); The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion) For what it’s worth, I’ll begin with a few observations on the above which, to remind you once again, represents a collective expression of the regular contributors and the editors of this magazine, who passed lists along to me in a…

Intense duets are at the centre of Ashley McKenzie’s cinema. Her 2016 debut Werewolf portrayed a pair of emotionally conjoined drug users, juxtaposing devotion and addiction as two sides of the same coin. In her follow-up, Queens of the King Dynasty, which recently premiered in Berlin’s Encounters competition, a young psychiatric patient and her volunteer caregiver form a codependent relationship with shifting emotional and power dynamics. Both outsiders of a kind, the two characters each recognize some aspect of themselves in the body and soul of the other. Checked into a Cape Breton emergency ward after what is evidently the latest in a series of suicide attempts, 18-year-old Star (Sarah Walker) is, as Lawrence Garcia writes in Mubi’s Notebook, like a glitch in the system. No matter how educated and wellintentioned…

In a short catalogue note on Joyce Wieland’s La raison avant la passion (1969), Hollis Frampton described this trans-Canadian epic as a film “about the pain and joy of living in a very large space: in fact, in a continent.” Six years later, James Benning and Bette Gordon would make a film that brought many of Wieland’s formal and thematic concerns south of the border, gave it a rather more direct title—The United States of America—and, in appropriately American fashion, cast themselves as demurring stars. Where Wieland’s film consists largely of landscapes seen through the passenger’s window of fast-moving cars, Benning and Gordon placed their camera in the back seat, shooting past themselves through the windshield, as they traversed the States from east to west. And while La raison avant…

In “The Present Absence,” his introductory essay for the Austrian Film Museum’s English-language monograph dedicated to Ruth Beckermann, Nick Pinkerton pinpoints the central question that has animated much of Beckermann’s work as a filmmaker, writer, editor, photographer, and installation artist over the past five decades: “What then is to be done? How is a past no one wants to remember to be regained for posterity?” Born in postwar Vienna to Holocaust survivors, Beckermann has devoted her career to excavating, with a dogged curiosity, the social, political, and economic histories of 19th- and 20th-century Austria, always balancing a sincere generosity toward her human subjects with a precise critique of the systems in which they work, worship, strive, and struggle. Mutzenbacher, her twelfth feature and winner of the Best Film prize in…

Is there a film book more influential than Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art? Just reading the opening paragraph reminds one of the urgency and curiosity it transmits to the reader—now, here’s a mission statement, but the mission is to make you think: “This is a book about the subversion of existing values, institutions, mores, and taboos—East and West, Left and Right—by the potentially most powerful art of the century. It is a book that traffics in skepticism towards all received wisdom (including its own), towards eternal truths, rules of art, ‘natural’ and man-made laws, indeed whatever may be considered holy. It is an attempt to preserve for a fleeting moment in time—the life of this book—the works and achievements of the subversives of film.” As it turned out, Vogel…

Of all this year’s Berlinale prizes, Claire Denis’ Silver Bear for Best Director was the one seemingly every cinephile could agree on. With the win—incredibly, Denis’ first prize from any of the major international festivals—the 75-year-old French director caps a recent run of films that have broadened the scope and stylistic parameters of her work, and with it our understanding of a filmmaker whose output only gets stranger the further she journeys from the orbit of global art cinema. In that sense, bestowing an award on Denis for the fiery marital melodrama Avec amour et acharne ment, her fifteenth feature, is both a belated bit of recognition for one of the world’s great filmmakers and a not-insignificant show of support for a film that, in many ways, epitomizes a late…