Tabla de contenidos para Issue 80 - Fall 2019 en Cinema Scope

A moving study of mourning and memory, Pedro Costa’s revelatory new film offers an indelible portrait of Vitalina Taveres Varela, a fragile yet indomitable woman who makes the long voyage from Cape Verde to Lisbon to attend her estranged husband’s funeral, but misses the event itself because of cruel bureaucratic delays. The name and tragic story will be familiar to those who know Costa’s previous masterwork, Horse Money (2014), in which Vitalina appears as one of the ghostly figures alternately confronting and comforting Costa regular Ventura during his soul-searching stay in a haunted sanatorium. Vitalina Varela forms a diptych with that earlier film, extending its intermingling of personal and national trauma while refining Costa’s unique mode of oneiric first-person cinema in which inner voices are theatrically recited like prayers. Ventura…

I. Although there have always been intrepid critics and cinephiles who have engaged with films belonging to the non-narrative avant-garde, there has existed a perception that such films, operating as they do on somewhat different aesthetic precepts, could be considered a separate cinematic realm, one that even the most dutiful critic could engage with or not, as he or she saw fit. In the ’80s, for example, there was a book series entitled Film—The Front Line that was intended to be an annual assessment of the year in experimental cinema. The text was assigned to a different critic each year, who would themselves decide how “experimental” would be defined. While Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the 1983 edition, carefully considered the relationship between what we once called “art cinema” and the “co-op”…

“If power oppresses farmers, and if policemen beat farmers, then our camera will be on the frontline to receive that beating, so that the ‘message’ of power can be directly conveyed to the audience through the screen.”—Ogawa Shinsuke on Narita: Summer in Sanrizuka (1968) “We filmed every day and after nearly 140 days of shooting our memory of each single day is vivid and precise. What we filmed was not a daily journal, but the climax of problems that accumulated while waiting for a solution.”—Tsuchimoto Noriaki on Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1972) It is no coincidence that Japan’s two greatest documentarians, Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008) and Ogawa Shinsuke (1935-1992), have long been paired together. There is, most obviously, their shared biography. In the early ’60s, Ogawa and Tsuchimoto cut…

The news cycle waits for no one, not even J. Hoberman. Opening up the former Village Voice critic’s new book Make My Day—the conclusion, following The Dream Life and An Army of Phantoms, of his “Found Illusions” trilogy, which traces the intersection of Hollywood fantasies and American political reality in the transformative decades after World War II—on the same day that The Atlantic published an article detailing Ronald Reagan’s appalling comments to Richard Nixon about the members of a Tanzanian delegation to the United Nations in 1971, I couldn’t help but lament the anecdote’s lack of inclusion in Hoberman’s otherwise comprehensively withering mock-hagiography of the 40th Commander in Chief. Perhaps in a future edition the author will find a way, in his inimitable style, to link the audiotaped evidence of…

“The most beautiful film is our own history,” confessed Marco Bellocchio to a journalist following the release of The Traitor, after it surpassed Godzilla: King of the Monsters at the Italian box office, proving yet again that the Mafia movie is still a commodity worth investing in. While the adjective “beautiful” might be up for debate, it’s undeniable that the history of postwar Italy is richer in plot twists, tragicomic exploits, and violent assaults on the established order than your average Hollywood blockbuster. For better or worse, Italian screenwriters can rely on an ever-growing database of (sur)real stories that the most fervid imagination would have a hard time coming up with. And as the accurately depicted scenes of the Maxi Trial of Palermo in The Traitor show, Italians retain their…

“A useless piece of drivel about an obnoxious group of teens who get ‘teleported’ into the future, where they are expected to set up a new civilization in Idaho.”—Motion Picture Guide, author and edition unknown, found on the apparently abandoned Idaho Film Commission website The late Peter Fonda—actor, celebrity, experimental filmmaker, activist, head—never actually did enjoy an easy ride, career-wise. Onscreen and behind the camera, he had brilliant flashes and boyish enthusiasms, often in the same sweet breath. His work was uneven, sometimes even unseemly, but always, always beautiful in prismatic and evanescent ways, part and parcel of the pacific dreams and bitter disappointments of his day. The above-quoted drivel, from a critic I’ve left un-Googled, typifies much of the appreciation that Fonda (1940-2019) was awarded as a filmmaker in…

“Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its handmaiden.”—Jack London, Martin Eden Pietro Marcello’s decade-long evolution from idiosyncratic film essayist to grand narrative storyteller represents one of the most significant artistic flowerings in contemporary cinema. Recently unveiled in competition at Venice, the Italian filmmaker’s fifth feature, Martin Eden, is momentous in ways that many Marcello enthusiasts may not expect: distinctly big, dramatic, and affecting, it confirms Marcello’s burgeoning talents and marks the belated arrival of a singular artist to the international art-house stage. More impressively, it does so without sacrificing the beauty, rigour, and intelligence that has built Marcello’s reputation as one of European cinema’s foremost fusionists. Indeed, one can draw a mostly straight line…

With his first two features, Tower (2012) and How Heavy This Hammer (2015), Toronto-based director and MDFF co-founder Kazik Radwanski established something of a recurring archetype: sad, lonely, and horny men whose unpleasant or uninteresting qualities are accentuated by the director’s unrelenting approach of shooting almost entirely in medium close-ups. The prospect of spending an hour and a half with people lacking in notable virtue, alluring vice, or any apparent interest, may seem like an unproductive exercise in forced empathy—but consider this skepticism a function, as opposed to a fault, of these tightly orchestrated, seemingly soporific character studies. Although Tower’s Derek (Derek Bogart), an aspiring animator afflicted by premature hair loss, and How Heavy This Hammer’s Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem), a neglectful father who wastes his life on an online…

Like an alien dropping out of the sky, Yoav, the hero of Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, is introduced as a being without a home, a purpose, or even clothes. As he scrambles naked around a vacant Parisian apartment, his strong, lean, athletic body mitigates his desperate situation: it’s the body of someone who could possibly survive anything. It’s also the body of the incredible new actor Tom Mercier, who has never acted before in cinema. As if out of a fairy tale, Yoav luckily has a couple, would-be writer Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and orchestra oboist Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), take him in. Charming yet harsh, friendly yet unhinged, Yoav emerges as something close to a Holy Fool, a cousin to Nagel, the lonely eccentric of Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries. He wants to completely…

Scaled for maximum effect, and weighted with tableaux designed to inspire horrible awe, the latest documentary from Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter may prove damningly prophetic yet ultimately diminished by the very industrial and environmental changes it so assiduously labours to portray. Such is the accelerated subjugation of the natural world in the age of the Anthropocene that not even Geyrhalter’s prodigious output can capture it with sufficient efficacy—which begs the question of whether the imagery itself isn’t merely part of the spectacular turn, the highlight reel of our twilight days. While Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (2015) may have changed how, or what, we eat, it is less clear what actionable outcome Earth might engender, other than to make us recognize that we are living in subnature. Geyrhalter’s oeuvre is predicated…

After two films set in Morocco—You Are All Captains (2010) and the Cannes Critics Week winner Mimosas (2016)—French-born Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe returns to his parents’ homeland of Galicia for his third feature, Fire Will Come, which the director has called a “dry melodrama.” The narrative is certainly simple enough: a middle-aged man, Amador (Amador Arias), recently released from prison after serving two years for setting fire to the woods, returns home and resumes his solitary, monotonous life with his aged mother, Benedicta (Benedicta Sanchez), on the small farm that they share with a dog and three cows. “Dryness,” however, could also connote combustibility, and as the camera repeatedly surveys the strikingly beautiful yet menacing landscapes of the Galician heights—thickly forested with trees charged with the potential energy to burst…

On the occasion of last year’s Big Ears Festival, an annual showcase of film and music in Knoxville, Tennessee, writer-director Paul Harrill curated “A Sense of Place,” a program of American independent films grounded in regional idiosyncrasies and often realized on the micro-budget level—a lineage that his own work very much falls within. Selections included now-classic titles such as Herk Harvey’s Utah-shot Carnival of Souls (1962) and Eagle Pennell’s lo-fi, Austin-set The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978), the latter of which Robert Redford once cited as his inspiration for starting the Sundance Institute. It might seem appropriate, then, that Harrill’s new feature Light From Light premiered at Sundance earlier this year, nearly two decades after his short Gina, An Actress, Age 29 won the festival’s Jury Prize in 2001. And yet,…

In Jessica Sarah Rinland’s 2016 short The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior), a shy, studious eight-year-old becomes transfixed by a nature documentary while her more rambunctious classmates whisper and pass notes around her. “The ostrich is incapable of doing the one thing birds are famous for: they cannot fly,” the documentary’s narrator intones with BBC-inflected authority. Rinland registers the young girl’s enthusiasm in extreme close-ups, first focusing on her eyes and then the corner of her mouth, suggesting a secret smile. The other kids are all framed in wider shots, bored and antsy like the schoolboys in Le quatre cents coups (1959). When discussion turns to the ostrich’s defence mechanisms—its uncommon speed, strength, stride, and agility—Rinland cuts to a close-up of the girl’s ear, underlining the message of the…

“There are two prejudices in pre-existing cinema: filmmaking is a male job and the movie should be fun. We, as outsiders, will break these biases.”—Han Ok-hee, 1974 In 1974, a group of students from the prestigious Ewha Womans University in Seoul formed South Korea’s first feminist film collective, Kaidu Club. Shepherded by the group’s de-facto president Han Ok-hee, the other members—who participated with varying degrees of involvement over the Club’s five years of existence—also included the painter Kim Jeom-seon, as well as academics and artists Lee Jeong-hee, Han Soon-ae, Jeong Myo-sook, and Wang Gyu-won. As the “Club” designation might suggest, the group was committed to both the promotion and production of experimental cinema, which was still in its domestic infancy. Both elements informed the Club’s official debut in July 1974,…

The 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival—the first under the artistic direction of Lili Hinstin—was notable for the strength of its documentary offerings, albeit hardly in the conventional sense. Within a solid line-up whose names and general tone didn’t deviate all that much from recent years, the films that stood out most were the ones that tapped into the realm of nonfiction—which isn’t to say they were necessarily documentaries. First and foremost among them was Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (which walked off with both the Golden Leopard and the prize for Best Actress), much of whose force derives from the fact that its astounding protagonist is performing a version of her own life story. Set against Costa’s singular, uncompromising vision, most of the rest of the Competition felt meek,…

Although it’s been served up since June on Amazon Prime in ten installments, Nicolas Winding Refn emphatically declared his—let’s call it “project” rather than “series” for the moment—Too Old to Die Young “not TV,” but rather a “13-hour movie” at this year’s Cannes, where he presented two episodes, pointedly snatched from the middle of the show’s chronology to mirror today’s aleatory online viewing habits. (Does the latter make Winding Refn’s epic also an act of defiance against the medium’s normal linear progression? Certainly, with its character arcs converging at near-interminable rates, it often feels as if it could be watched at random—a method its director has also endorsed, all contradictions be damned.) But I guess Winding Refn’s own definition of his work is fair enough, given that Too Old to…

In The United States of America (1975), James Benning and Bette Gordon take a trip across the country, from east to west. Structural film meets the road movie, as a 16mm camera is mounted in the backseat of their car, facing forward, taking in the passing terrain as it’s framed by the windshield. The couple sits in the front, their bodies positioned solidly between the lens and the land, ever visible in the frame but yielding no personal information. In the car, with the radio on, they speed together through the expanses of America, the land of the free. Over 40 years later, Miko Revereza’s first feature film No Data Plan makes a similar journey, albeit in reverse, beginning in Los Angeles and ending in New York. Or perhaps it…

In an interview with Film Comment’s Michael Koresky after the release of Hereditary (2018), Ari Aster spoke of the logic behind his taboo-busting 2011 thesis film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons. Gesturing to his desire to rock the apple cart at the American Film Institute, a feeder school for serious filmmakers, he claims he started from the place of asking himself “What’s the worst thing I can make at the AFI?” and landed on a family drama about a father being sexually assaulted by his malevolent son. It’s a solid bad-boy origin story for a scrappy young talent, whose formalist chops across Hereditary and his sophomore effort Midsommar seem deliberately at odds with his histrionic, overripe material, as if the latter needed enriching by the former. Midsommar’s protracted runtime,…