Tabla de contenidos para Issue 74 - Spring 2018 en Cinema Scope

Joseph Kahn did not much care for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016). When the movie opened, he unleashed a sarcastic Twitter storm: “White people will love LA LA LAND…The dance numbers in LA LA LAND feel like Verizon commercials…99% of the couples in LA are interracial, except the one in LA LA LAND, and the white couples at Cinerama Dome watching that white couple…LA LA LAND is exactly like Los Angeles when I got there in 1995. White people swing dancing around coffee shops…I have yet to meet one black person who saw LA LA LAND who didn’t complain about how wack the dancing and singing was.” Kahn’s spectacular new movie Bodied (which was in postproduction when La La Land was released) can perhaps be thought of as the…

—from a pirate radio broadcast in Born in Flames The revolution has been victorious, and the Social Democrats have been governing the US for a decade under the banner of equality for all. But sexism and racism still run rampant, leading to the foundation of a Women’s Army comprised of divergent groups that have to unite their different perspectives under a common cause…and they do. The revolution will be transmitted by pirate radio. The fantasy premise of Lizzie Borden’s feminist guerrilla classic Born in Flames (1983) may not exactly evoke the current situation in the US, but it still speaks to our moment, as proven by the successful tour of Anthology Film Archives’ recent 35mm restoration. Born out of anger and shot over five years in the streets of New…

Taking the lead of the film’s maker, the vast majority of critics writing about Phantom Thread have dutifully remarked upon the similarities between Paul Thomas Anderson’s film and Alfred Hitchcock’s first American picture Rebecca (1940), overlaying the triangle of dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), his young livein lover Alma (Vicky Krieps), and Woodcock’s imperious sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) over that of brooding aristocrat Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), his naive second wife (Joan Fontaine), and the demonic housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), whose mad devotion to Maxim’s dead first wife Rebecca leads her to try and drive the new Mrs. de Winter to suicide. But while Anderson’s openly invited comparison has predictably inspired musings on the film’s greater or lesser Hitchcockianness—particularly as the plot comes to turn upon a slight…

There are no actual trees in Tree Identification for Beginners, the latest film by the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. The absence is curious given not only the title, but the central role trees and other foliage have played in several of the artist’s projects over nearly two decades, as part of a diverse and interdisciplinary practice that incorporates photography, sculpture, print, and installation. Whether literal or symbolic, the arboreal in Barrada’s work can serve as a means of resistance or of decorative posturing, opening onto questions of familial lineage, colonialism, and urban development. Nestled in the hyphen between “home” and “grown,” Barrada’s varied oeuvre continually and deceptively interpellates global questions of social and political development within seemingly small-scale points of inquiry, chief among them her own family. Living between Paris…

If you’re looking for the lowdown on this year’s Berlinale Competition, which is known far and wide for its mediocrity, you’ve come to the wrong place. This year’s edition looked especially bleak on paper, and this writer’s one attempt to venture into the great unknown did not go unpunished. Axel Petersen and Mans Mansson’s revolting “comedy” The Real Estate is an offensive and elitist satire of the housing crisis in Stockholm that irresponsibly revels in its protagonist’s classism far more than it criticizes it; it may have been the section’s worst entry, though thankfully I can neither be proven right nor wrong. (Continuing with a habit of missing prizewinners, I’ll have to catch up later with Adina Pintilie’s surprise Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not.) The standouts were predictable but…

“Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways.”—Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image Made up largely of short close-ups, Sadaf Foroughi’s debut feature Ava, winner of the FIPRESCI prize at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, is modelled forcefully and at times faultily on a concept coined by former Cahiers critic Pascal Bonitzer: décadrage (unframing), canted compositions that are not justified by the requirements of action or perception, images geometrically detached from those that would cumulatively create an illusion of 360-degree space. Borrowing heavily from Bonitzer…

Premiered at Berlin a few months before its creator Sebastian Lelio’s first foray into English-language filmmaking with the Rachel Weisz-starring Disobedience, A Fantastic Woman sees the Chilean writer-director taking another angle on the tale he told in his 2013 breakthrough Gloria: that of a down-on-her-luck woman restrained by social mores that ultimately prove too small to contain her. Where, true to its title, Gloria resolved itself into a Laura Branigan-styled power ballad about the sexual potency and resiliency of its eponymous fiftysomething heroine (Paulina Garcia, who will be replaced by Julianne Moore in Lelio’s forthcoming remake), in A Fantastic Woman Lelio raises the dramatic stakes without substantially deepening his text, offering an undercooked character study that doubles as an LGBTQ riff on Sophocles’ Antigone, loosely revolving around its heroine’s thesis…

“What does it matter? All is grace.” —Curé d’Ambricourt, Journal d’un curé de campagne The question in any cinema that aspires to be devotional is this: where can we locate the spirit, the soul, the love? More specifically, where does grace become concrete? For Dreyer, it was in the face; for Scorsese, in the individual’s conscience, in one’s will to do good; and for Dorsky, in the medium itself—revealed only by makers who acknowledge and remain sensitive to its formal situation. For Chicago-based filmmaker Stephen Cone, devotion—a religious observance of God, yes, but also the fervour and allegiance we feel for other people—is a matter of community. It’s in the fact that we live amongst other beings, that we share space with those who desire and believe different things than…

The quarrel between word and image is, on the eve of the third millennium of an illustrious career, in a period of relative calm, one marked by a casual cohabitation which has produced gratifying results in the arts and considerable trouble elsewhere, where it tends to be mistaken for the decay of a consensus on truth, or at least the truth of a given matter. This trouble, felt acutely in America but resonant globally, gnaws at the edges of much of our times’ most sophisticated art. As the mid-century painters, who tracked flatness and presence towards an absolute clarification of the terms of their art, would likely be alarmed at the energies now given to modes of figuration both literary and illusionistic, so the filmmakers, led by Brakhage, who endeavoured…

The United States was not attacked by the nuclear arsenal of North Korea on January 13, 2018, but it is a date that will live in infamy all the same. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” read an unsigned emergency message claiming that ballistic missiles were “inbound to Hawaii”; many of the Aloha State’s residents had the warning beamed directly to their cell phones. It took less than 30 minutes for authorities to conclude that this apocalypse-now alert had been a mistake, a false alarm caused by an employee who had “pressed the wrong button” before clocking out. The wording of the explanation was worthy of a classic Simpsons episode; you may recall that power-plant safety technician Homer once prevented a meltdown by playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe with his keyboard. (D’oh!) But in…

“We are not so much agents as intermediaries when we introduce film to light, as we might bring together two good friends, hoping they will love one another as we love them both,” wrote Hollis Frampton. Just such a benevolent spirit was Paul Clipson, whose sudden death leaves the San Francisco Bay Area deprived of one of its most genial, discerning, and prolific film artists. An insatiable cinematographer and unfailingly insightful visual thinker, Clipson’s lyrical filmmaking was only one aspect of his multifaceted passion for cinema. Having long since mastered in-camera editing and superimposition, Clipson extended his intuitive art in live collaborations with a cohort of sympathetic musicians and composers. These performances became such a fixture of Bay Area life over the last 15 years as to seem like their…

Televisual and serialized storytelling has long been haunted by a Scheherazadean sense of the relation between storytelling and death. Like that famous narrator’s death-defying fabrications in Arabian Nights, the longer a television show goes on, the more it reminds us that an inevitable end is coming, every new episode only forestalling this death-like cessation of its characters and fictional world. Damon Lindelof, he of the generation of television writers that became “showrunners,” leans into this connection more than most. In the finale of his and Carlton Cuse’s influential Lost (2004-2010), still famously (and only semi-fairly) hated many years after the fact, the pair outraged viewers by directly confronting the link between death and the end of a story: the episode organized itself around the “revelation” that, eventually, all of these…

It’s an epidemic: the populist appeal of genre cinema is undeniable, even here at home. In a bit of a surprise, Robin Aubert’s Les affamés won Best Canadian Feature at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and then the Temps O People’s Choice Award at the Festival du nouveau cinema in Montreal. Months later, following a solid global festival run, the film landed a spot in TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten. It appears, then, that a film best described in press kit-speak as an “arthouse horror-thriller” is the ideal token we can put forward as our national cinematic brand. That the film is in French only bolsters its case, distancing it from the notions of Americanness its living-dead premise evokes. Netflix, for one, has bought a lot more than the hype,…

Early on in The Work, a documentary chronicling intense group therapy techniques practiced inside Folsom State Prison outside of Sacramento, California, a man suffers a violent meltdown. He is Brian, one of three outside visitors that directors Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous follow as they join inmates over a four-day course of treatment. His distress is not an uncommon sight under the circumstances: what is more worrisome is his doubt regarding the ultimate benefits of the punishing emotional labour on display. A guide puts his hand on Brian’s shoulder and asks him gently, “Are you willing to simply trust the process?” McLeary and Aldous trust the process completely. It took several years for the filmmakers to obtain access to the high-security prison, even though McLeary is a one-time volunteer whose…

On November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a civilian American scientist and Central Intelligence Agency employee, fell or jumped through a window from the 13th floor of the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) in midtown Manhattan. Thus begins Errol Morris’ plunge into the sordid, sensational CIA “mind-control” program known as MK-Ultra, with Peter Sarsgaard’s defenestrated body flailing in slow motion alongside the opening credits, to the tune of “No Other Love” from the 1953 Rogers and Hammerstein musical Me and Juliet. It’s a literally destabilizing overture to what, 11 feature documentaries and one aborted fiction film into his career, stands as Morris’ most exemplary work to date: a six-part, 241-minute portmanteau of images and textures that utilize virtually every tool in the documentarian’s formal arsenal. It’s an obsessive plunge akin…

For Morgan Fisher, Another Movie is anything but another movie. The result of a decades-long reconsideration of the art and persona of Bruce Conner, Fisher’s first new film in 15 years attempts to reckon with a work of such time-honoured merit that its mere existence feel courageous. Conner’s epochal debut A Movie (1958), a 12-minute montage of disaster-related found footage set to Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome, simultaneously crystallized a genre and incited what is now recognized as the second generation of the postwar American avant-garde, to which Fisher’s first decade of meta-materialist film work both epitomizes and deconstructs movie-by-movie, methodby-method. “The motif of fascism in A Movie is very pronounced,” Fisher would say in a 1983 interview (published in 1987) with Film Quarterly, as he was beginning work on…

In Park City this January, all of those attending the Sundance Film Festival were told in no uncertain terms on a daily, if not hourly, basis that “the story lives in you.” The statement was right there on the cover of the catalogue, so dominant that it replaced the words—“Sundance Film Festival”—that you’d assume would be there. (Those words were left to the catalogue spine.) Other words accompanied this insistent phrase on the cover, including “Obsession,” “Euphoria,” and “Graceful Chaos.” These were part of what could charitably be termed the strangest graphic system ever applied to a major film festival, which involved nothing more than blue colour fields and such odd, disassociated words in orange serif lettering: a banner on Main Street, the bustling thoroughfare at the heart of the…

Consider the opening scene of Zigeunerweisen (1980), the first film in Suzuki Seijun’s so-called Taisho trilogy, to be emblematic of the whole, as it models the kind of mesmeric interpretive process that viewers must re-enact in the films that follow, Kagero-za (1981) and Yumeji (1991). Sometime in the Taisho era—the brief imperial period in Japan that lasted from 1912 to 1926—two old friends and former colleagues from a military academy listen to a record of the Basque violinist Pablo de Sarasate playing his composition “Zigeunerweisen” (“Gypsy Airs”). During a lull in the music, over the crackle of the gramophone needle, someone on the recording murmurs unintelligibly. Is it Sarasate himself? What does he say? Why the urgent tone? The friends listen again; the mystery remains. A voice calling out from…

The Normandy village of Pirou-Plage almost became a holiday destination. In 1990, property developer Pier Invest launched a plan to build a hotel, two tennis courts, and 80 vacation homes. The initiative would transform the built environment and economy of this seaside area of 1,500 inhabitants—but not as anticipated or desired. Within a few years, Pier Invest had declared bankruptcy, leaving devastated local businesses and the shells of some 30 incomplete structures in its wake. French newspaper Le Monde called the site a “village fantome”; it was a stillborn community that never lived. Pirou-Plage is one of the rural locations that Agnes Varda and her collaborator, thirtysomething street artist JR, visit in their whimsical travelogue Visages villages. A drone shot offers an aerial view of its decrepit, graffiti-clad houses before…

Less than six minutes into High Fantasy, four teenagers on a road trip to a farm on South Africa’s Northern Cape—where they intend to camp under the stars and potentially smoke some half-decent marijuana—are sharing their emotional responses to the surrounding scenery, direct to camera. Training her cell phone camera on the car’s other passengers, the provocative Xoli (Qondiswa James) asks how “the land” makes each person “feel”—a neat, bitchy way to draw attention to the fact that their white friend Lexi’s (Francesca Varrie Michel) family “stole” their farm from its indigenous owners. Apparently oblivious to Xoli’s insinuation, Lexi says the land makes her feel “trapped;” for sensitive biracial peacekeeper Tatiana (Liza Scholtz), it’s “tainted…because it was ripped from other people.” Lexi glances awkwardly at the camera recording the conversation.…

How many names can you call Bruce Conner? Surrealist, beat, prankster, poet, illustrator, assemblagist, filmmaker, punk. Spray-paint anything you like across Conner’s legacy and someone will think it sticks. A few years ago, a big brain from Harvard hilariously decreed this slipperiest of major American filmmakers a “structuralist” (never mind the centrality of “content” in, or the profoundly expressive and emotive strains running throughout, the artist’s work); elsewhere in the pages of this very magazine you’ll find musings on the “fascist aesthetic” in Conner’s A Movie. Myriad, sometimes mirthful, but often wholly misguided, such assessments litter the Google-field of old newspaper articles on the artist from New York to Los Angeles. Conner (1933-2008) reveled in the tipsy tumult of his ever-elusive “reputation,” sometimes billing his work as a “Dennis Hopper…