Cinema Scope Issue 89 - Winter 2022

An editor’s note is a safe space that is wholly devoted to allowing me to write about that which I want, and I did consider coming up with some words on the most impressive moving-image event for me in 2021—which, of course, is Peter Jackson’s jaw-dropping The Beatles: Get Back, the Out 1 of music documentaries (release the 40-hour Jackson cut!). But more and more, I’m not inclined to give my two-pence-worth on these things, probably because internet squirrels are scratching away at the bodies before they are even cold, so that by the time this periodical comes around the corpses have been pecked clean to the bone. I guess if someone held a gun to my head, Get Back would have a place on my year-end list, but frankly, I’m…

Paul Thomas Anderson loves start-up entrepreneurs and fly-by-night schemes: you could run a straight line between There Will Be Blood’s (2007) oil magnate Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Punch-Drunk Love’s (2002) humble toilet-plunger impresario Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) just as easily as you could imagine the latter signing up for one of the “Seduce and Destroy” seminars run by Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) in Magnolia (1999). The ultimate huckster in the PTACU would be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd in The Master (2012), a Wellesian tyro who’s found a way to package and sell the prospect of returning to a “state of perfect”—a costly but finally priceless means of exorcising any and all inherent vice. Operators are standing by. Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), the resourceful 15-year-old pisher at the centre…

The pear of anguish is a medieval torture instrument, whose spoon-like metal segments spread at the turn of a screw in its centre. Also known as the “choke pear” because it was often applied to the victim’s mouth, it could be inserted into any orifice. Strapped to the torture rack, young nun Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) gets a presentation of the pear by the papal nuncio (Lambert Wilson, luxuriating in an air of well-meaning condescension): “Joan of Arc was a brave warrior, as even her enemies had to admit. Nevertheless, she confessed her sins when shown the instruments of torture. Don’t pretend to be braver than Joan of Arc.” The torturer takes over, one-upping the nuncio’s hypocritical solemnity by dutifully declaring (before he inserts the pear offscreen into the screaming nun’s…

Joanna Hogg chases authenticity. Her reluctance to call “Cut,” instead letting a scene’s action carry on via languid takes, static camerawork, and unscripted dialogue, reflects her intuitive sense of how small but telling slips within the typically dull cadences of British upper-middle-class social chatter can reveal roiling undercurrents of feeling. Yet while her debut feature, Unrelated (2007), convincingly sold this illusion of casualness, the visual and narrative rigour that underlies it came to the fore as early as her follow-up, Archipelago (2010). At one point in the latter, members of a family taking an off-season vacation are grouped against the severe blankness of a blue-gray wall, where an almost imperceptible differentiation in colour draws our eyes to a phantom square. The characters, who have holidayed in this house frequently over…

Formalist though I may be, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate any given film from its association with Netflix. This is especially the case during awards season, as Netflix is throwing away obscene amounts of money on tacky gift boxes for critics and Academy members. The lavishly illustrated catalogues that depict every aspect of a given production might make good doorstops, but affording films like The Hand of God the sort of coffee-table treatment usually reserved for Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh seems a little cocky. Few viewers have laid eyes on these films, yet Netflix provides all the trappings of classic-film monumentality. But ironically, the company may have stumbled upon a kind of formalist reality with respect to the films themselves. In the marketing department’s focus on eye-catching swag,…

“If what I think is going to happen does happen, no one will send you the last film. You’ll have to come and get it,” declares Pedro (Will More) in the opening scene of Arrebato. Made during Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Franco, Iván Zulueta’s 1979 film is a dark child of the La Movida Madrilena countercultural movement: a claustrophobic film about addiction, of both the narcotic and cinematic variety. Pedro’s provocation is the catalyst for the other members of the film’s central trio—filmmaker José (Eusebio Poncela) and his actor ex-girlfriend Ana (Cecilia Roth)—to join his quest for the rapture referred to in Zulueta’s title. His early belief in the power of cinema dispelled by his experiences in the commercial Spanish film industry, José returns from home on…