Cinema Scope

It’s that time again. Over the last two decades in these pages I’ve spent way too much time (at great personal anguish) trying to come to grips with the experience of the Festival de Cannes even if by this point in the history of film journalism, a few weeks after the fact everything anyone could say about Cannes has already been said. But I know that many readers take vicarious pleasure from reading my report, so as long as we keep going, or until Cannes hires me, I guess I’m stuck doing it. This year, along with the usual half-serious bitching, I chose to focus in depth on only one title of which I hopefully am able to provide a modicum of unique insight, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction. So, I did…

“The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been; the present is what man ought not to be; the future is what artists are.”—Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future may be marked as a “return” for the 79-year-old director in a number of respects. His first feature in eight years, it is also his first to be based on an original script since eXistenZ. In addition, Crimes sees Cronenberg revisiting, after a fashion, his 1970 film of the same name, from which he’s taken the central premise of genetic mutations in humans which have resulted in the spontaneous growth of…

“I feel a great affinity with Poe; I understand his pain.”—Dario Argento, interviewed by Maitland McDonagh The first shot is a panoramic view of Rome on a bright summer day. It seems unusually quiet as we swerve along mostly depopulated streets looking through the windscreen of a car. The gliding movements produce a slightly otherworldly feel, enhanced by the floating sounds of Arnaud Rebotini’s electronic music. A shot looking up at houses, sky, and treetops warps our perception with a split-screen effect, and part of the image shows views from an alternate angle, as if two images coming from different directions had aligned themselves magically on the same pane of glass. Counter-shots show the person whose point of view we are sharing: a female driver (Ilenia Pastorelli) looking out, and looking…

Writing in 1971, Vivian Gornick described the US women’s movement as “a declaration of independence against the false description of the self.” Although articulated in a different place and time, the phrase has a distinct resonance with the documentary films Helke Misselwitz made in East Germany in the ’80s—an essential body of work now enjoying a renewed international circulation, with recent retrospectives at New York’s Anthology Film Archives and Spain’s Play-Doc festival, and as part of the four-woman program “Films d’Allemagne(s), 1978–2020” at the Goethe-Institut in Paris. As the German Democratic Republic ambled into its twilight years, Misselwitz filmed everyday people at work and at home, gave women and girls the chance to tell their own stories, and captured the textures of a country that would soon cease to exist.…

The experimental filmmakers known as Colectivo los ingrávidos came together in Tehuacán, Mexico in 2012, adopting their name—which translates into English as “the weightless”—from the title of the first novel of Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, a work that examines acts of translation playing out in three parallel lives against a backdrop of Spanish-language literary culture in North America. Inspired by Luiselli’s themes of translation, displacement, and the imaginative reconstruction of identity, los ingrávidos posed a challenge to the repressive ideology so often articulated in mainstream cinema through the pursuit of an alternative, radical grammar of poetic filmmaking. Their approach is one that contests cultural officialdom, cherishes ecstatic communions with the natural world, and tethers aesthetic experience to social support and free will, utilizing a diversity of forms and processes—from diaristic…

The brightest light in the Chinese independent cinema world at this moment is Beijing-based filmmaker and artist Qiu Jiongjiong. In an atmosphere of increasing surveillance and control of non-official, unauthorized artistic activity in China, Qiu, now 44, stands out as an artist with a powerful, complex, engaging vision who has found a way to continue to work without compromise. His new film, A New Old Play, premiered at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival and is now having a series of screenings in North America, following its pickup by Icarus Films via their dGenerate Films Collection. Qiu grew up steeped in the backstage atmosphere of traditional Chinese theatre, and most of his works remain infused with the sounds and sights he absorbed there. He first achieved domestic fame among art collectors, who…