Cinema Scope Issue 82 - Spring 2020

editor’s note

And so goes the decade, and perhaps all of humanity as we know it—it was fun while it lasted. As a supplement to the Top Ten lists printed here, which semi-scientifically summarize the privately expressed preferences of our regular contributors, I decided to do something a little different to glance back at the past ten years. By the time of publication you can find numerous examples of excellent writing on all of the films in our decade-end list, both in previous issues of Cinema Scope and also in other publications, in print and online, on the occasion of revisiting the past ten bountiful years in cinema. So I came up with the benignly nationalistic idea of focusing on what transpired in Canadian cinema over the past decade, but with a twist.…

the cinema scope top ten of 2019

1. I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec) 2. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa) 3. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcelo) 4. Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie) 5. Liberté (Albert Serra) 6. Heimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise) 7. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho) 8. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino) 9. Synonyms (Nadav Lapid) 10. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese) Special Mentions: Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Frank Beauvais); Present.Perfect. (Zhu Shengze); State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa); The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio); Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)…

the cinema scope top ten of the 2010s

1. Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch) 2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) 3. Zama (Lucrecia Martel) 4. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) 5. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) 6. L’Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) (Bertrand Bonello) 7. Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard) 8. Horse Money (Pedro Costa) 9. Tabu (Miguel Gomes) 10. Phoenix (Christian Petzold) Special Mentions: The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien); Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami); Holy Motors (Leos Carax); L’inconnu du lac (Alain Guiraudie); Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)…

a state of uncertainty

There’s no exact precedent for the long creative collaboration between Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. In 1991, as the story goes, Tsai stepped out of a screening of a David Lynch movie and spotted Lee sitting on a motorbike outside of an arcade. The director was struggling to cast a television program about troubled teens, so he struck up a conversation with Lee and invited him to audition. During the shoot Tsai became frustrated and began to doubt whether Lee could perform the role, and in the process he discovered that the problem was his own expectations. “I was projecting too many of my own ideas onto Lee’s performance, rather than allowing him to draw upon his own natural way of behaving,” Tsai told Declan McGrath in 2019. Over the course…

impresión de un cineasta

The title of Camilo Restrepo’s breakout short film, Impressions of a War (2015), suggests the anomalies inherent in conceiving of a historical portrait of modern Colombia. A war is not typically thought of as something that leaves an impression; rather, it maims, disables, obliterates, defaces, violates. Nor does its legacy register as a mere impression: the cumulative trauma amounts to nothing less than an indelible scar, both corporeal and psychological, that exceeds reason, conciliation, and memory. What, though, can one make of a war without end? A war among various factions whose ideologies can no longer be morally or politically inferred? A war in which an entire country, according to the film’s opening slate, has been turned into a battlefield, and a sense of generalized violence has gradually yet insidiously settled…

the oral cinema of sergio citti

“Film critics are like condoms talking about the pleasures of the orgasm.”—Sergio Citti While radically democratic when it comes to spectatorship, cinema does not tolerate illiteracy on the part of its makers. Unlike storytelling, which can be both written and oral, films, in order to be made, require a modicum of technological proficiency. Whether through schooling or apprenticeship, the craft of filmmaking has historically not been as widely accessible as other forms of cultural production. The classist dimension of the film industry depends also on its technological apparatus, which, until very recently, remained beyond the reach of most pockets. Few and far between are members of the working classes that found their way behind a camera (Claude Faraldo, Jean-Claude Brisseau, who else?). Without resorting to the fetishistic idealization of proletarian attributes,…