Tabla de contenidos para Issue 83 - Summer 2020 en Cinema Scope

About a third of the way into Med Hondo’s stunning 1979 musical West Indies ou les nègres marrons de la liberté, at which point the narrative has located itself at some unspecified time in the mid-20th century, a group of West African men and women boards a ship that will take them from the Antilles to the homeland of their French colonizers, following exhortations from a parade of French administrators, priests, social workers, and local puppet-government agents about the virtues of emigration and the joys of the metropole. Throughout these extended opening sequences, of course, Hondo has made amply clear that such coerced emigration is only intended to serve the colonial goal of disappearing the people of the islands—whether by literally removing them, or decimating the cultural and social forms…

The most arresting image in the new BBC Studios series Trigonometry (airing in the US this summer on HBO Max and in Canada on CBC Gem) comes in the fifth episode, when restaurateur Gemma (Thalissa Teixeira), in the middle of a difficult Nordic honeymoon getaway with her new husband Kieran (Gary Carr), goes on an evening field trip to see the Northern Lights. As Kieran sulks back at the hotel, she gazes up at a display that imbues the uncanny sensation—for the character, as well as the audience—of a planetarium-show special effect despite its you-are-there authenticity. As a visual metaphor for a young woman who is trying to “see the light” in response to her fraught personal situation, Gemma’s encounter with the Aurora Borealis is legible and clever, but as…

“Why do I have this feeling that it’d be better off if you were dead?” Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) says this to Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) in their first encounter inside a public-park washroom in Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams’ longform series, Ozark. As one of the notorious Langmores—a clan of (mostly) criminals going back to their early bootlegging days in the Ozarks, and close cousins to the ruthless, raucous Crowe family in Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens sagas (which were adapted into the series Justified, of which Ozark is a direct descendant)—Ruth was born with larceny in her heart and a keen instinct for sniffing out a fellow crook when she sees one. Marty, a Chicago investment advisor in flight from the law, has boldly barged in on the Langmores…

One May evening, I dipped into a Twitch stream in search of a fresh current. Within the weird undertow of quarantine, there is a new lustre to these live events, which mark unfixed days with a fixed hour—a dupe for the transient communion gone from cinemas that now lie empty. Some 200 of us “gathered” for a program, co-presented by Screen Slate and Electronic Arts Intermix, of short works from Cecelia Condit, a singular scrambler of feminine tropes and fairy tales since the ’80s. New to me among them was last year’s We Were Hardly More than Children, an oneiric memoir. From my laptop came Condit’s molasses-slow singsong: “In 1969, we were told that if you could afford it, you flew to London. Otherwise there was a third floor in…

What Fredric Jameson once identified as the cultural logic of late capitalism—“the waning of historicity,” i.e., the demise of popular modernist movements and the installation of a stagnant, homogeneous culture industry that recycles old forms while emptying them of their real historical content—no longer requires any of the author’s obscurantist language to describe. Twenty years into the new millennium, the pessimistic adages of late-20th-century theorists have become so tangible that we now feel them in our muscles. It’s no coincidence that the late Mark Fisher wrote so often about the correlation between the cementing of what we now know as neoliberalism and the increasing ubiquity of depression, a condition which he himself struggled with and sadly succumbed to in 2017, when he took his own life. If Fisher felt what…

Set in the Shiotani Basin, a short train ride from Kyoto, the long-awaited return of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström, a decade following The Anchorage, patiently accompanies Shiojiri Tayoko over five seasons in her small village of 47 predominantly elderly people (most of whom, like Tayoko, play themselves). Though it’s equally concerned with observations of nature and the simple way that life itself is lived, partway through the film a narrative gradually asserts itself, in the worsening sickness of Tayoko’s husband, Junji—though the presence of death is never far from the surface, whether seen through periodic visits to gravesites, fatal snakebite, the hunting of animals for food, or a fantastical story (told via subtitles) of a soldier’s return home from WWII to commune with the corpse of his recently deceased…

Christian Petzold returns to the present and bids a full farewell to realism in Undine, a fantasy-tinged, modern-day fairy tale that grafts the vicissitudes of Berlin city planning onto an uncharacteristically chirpy romance. Although fate is still predetermined to rear its head, the resultant romantic swoon lacks the same weight it carried in the German director’s period-set Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), and Transit (2018), an impeccable international breakthrough trilogy in whose long shadow Undine struggles to make its own, typically intelligent ideas about love and history shine. If Petzold’s ninth feature feels more of a quirky transition than a fully realized new direction, it still functions as an excellent primer for his directorial interests, as the various novelties on display are continually bolstered and enriched by past concerns, motifs, and…

“I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here…We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks…” Aspiring ballerina and reluctant burlesque performer Judy O’Brien’s (Maureen O’Hara) biting and caustic address to the hooting audience in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) became a five-alarm fire for the feminist film critics who rediscovered the film in the ’70s, adopting it as a key text and enshrining Arzner—the most prolific female director in the Hollywood studio system…

One of last year’s major comebacks, Color Out of Space heralds the belated return to fiction features for the South African-born director Richard Stanley, who, justly celebrated for his early triumphs Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), was fired a few days into shooting The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) and, in true maverick spirit, has kept himself busy since with documentaries, shorts, and script work. Apart from giving an indication of which direction his H.G. Wells adaptation might have taken decades ago—the bizarre end result, as finished by John Frankenheimer, is considered one of those notorious late-Marlon Brando follies (I beg to differ, but that’s a subject for another issue)—Stanley’s ostentatiously trippy, enjoyably weird, but also weirdly respectful modernization of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic short story is one of those…

First things first: an online film festival is weird, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. Naturally, one misses the enveloping concentration of the big screen and the dark room, no matter how much we may try to approximate that environment in our sequestration. And, of course, the social element—catching up with old friends and hashing out what we’ve just seen, together—is completely missing. Nevertheless, Switzerland’s Visions du Réel did its best to bring not only as many of their selected films online as possible, but all the usual accoutrements of a fully functioning international festival, including development seminars for filmmakers, a global market (including the pitching of new projects), and master classes conducted by Peter Mettler, Petra Costa, and Claire Denis. (In July, as a bonus for…

The hook is intriguingly straightforward: in Blood Quantum, an infectious zombie disease spreads through the world, save for the residents of a Mi’kmaq community along the Québec-New Brunswick border who appear to be immune to the undeadly virus. In the post-apocalyptic remnants of their town, Sheriff Traylor (Michael Greyeyes) and his deputies guard the boundaries of their land against the violent hordes of “Zeds.” Traylor is joined by his estranged ex Joss (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), their teenage son Joseph (Forrest Goodluck), and Traylor’s troubled eldest son, Lysol (Kiowa Gordon). It’s an effective setup that director Jeff Barnaby uses to work through generational trauma, both personal and collective: the director was a young boy when his community at the Restigouche Reserve was violently raided by Québec Provincial Police in June 1981. Also…

“The person who rejects creative power and creativity and the reproduction of oneself through the act of creation, that person rejects life itself, in all its existence.”—Anatoly Krupitsa, DAU. The Empire. Novel One: Return of the Prodigal Son At the press conference for the premiere of DAU. Natasha at this year’s Berlinale, director Ilya Khrzhanovsky pre-empted questions regarding the controversial methods involved in the realization of his 14-year passion project—collectively known as DAU—by contrasting the experiences of his actors with the everyday lives of their Soviet-era characters. “All the feelings [depicted in the film] are real,” he said, “but the circumstances are not real in which these feelings happen. In the real world you pay the maximum price. But in this unreal world…you pay in a different way.” Just how…

About six months ago, France was having a real Robert Kramer moment. A complete retrospective at the Cinématheque française in November 2019 was accompanied by an announcement from the Paris-based distributor Re:voir that they would be releasing an “OEuvres completes de Robert Kramer,” comprising 26 films in ten volumes. The first release—of Guns (1980), Kramer’s first feature film made in France, along with the medium-length Naissance (1981) and the short film La peur (1983)—hit the streets in January of this year. When the rest of Kramer’s corpus will actually be available remains to be seen, as only this title appears on Re:voir’s website and in their 2020 catalogue (even though, for some reason, the Guns DVD—which arrived in my mailbox just as this piece was being edited—is labelled as “Volume…

Every day, a brief tweet with a time and a URL: it’s usually for 7:00 pm Berlin time, 1:00 pm in eastern North America. At almost precisely 7:00 pm, we click, and a 9:16 aspect ratio window opens. The view, about ten degrees left from perpendicular, shows the keyboard and the left half of a grand piano, a painting and a couple of lamps hanging in view. Igor Levit, dressed casually, wearing socks or slippers, walks onscreen and sits on his piano stool. He talks for about five to ten minutes, first in German, then in English. Then he plays: Beethoven, Liszt, Shostakovich, Billy Joel. Twitter/Periscope’s muffled, distorted sound and low-definition image offers anywhere from 15 to 150 minutes of the most intensely charged piano playing I’ve ever heard. The…

What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Set in the ’50s, when Cold War paranoia and Space Race aspirations loomed large in America, The Vast of Night centres on a mysterious radio signal that hangs in the air over the fictional small town of Cayuga, New Mexico, and the local teens, Everett (Jake Horowitz) and Fay (Sierra McCormick), who set out to uncover the source. It’s the perfect setting for an extraterrestrial disturbance to shake up an idyllic oasis of Americana—so perfect that the set-up, like the mythical ’50s backdrop, initially feels a touch too clichéd for its own good. But what begins as a film playing with recognizable sci-fi tropes quickly develops into a remarkable melding of radio-play inspiration and cinematic ambition. Director Andrew Patterson’s debut is well versed in the sources…

Political filmmaker and pageant master Jack Smith’s final feature, No President—created and variously incarnated while Richard Nixon took office and the ’60s came to a close (and left, like all of his films after 1963’s Flaming Creatures, intentionally unfinished)—is a masque of race and death. White faces, black flesh, an enormous tusk, a bug-eyed succubus, holes in the plaster, acrid marihuana, vinyl exotica, a Christmas tree: these are the articles constituted. One nation, overexposed, with feather boas and liberation for all. Metamorphosis: tear gas wafts through the roses. And now here we are again, with the end of the Sixties just another Ludovico loop. But is the underground on top of things? At least, at last, No President (reconstituted by filmmaker Jerry Tartaglia) is on Vimeo. Hail to the grief.…