Table of contents for Issue 94 - Spring 2023 in Cinema Scope

“And then sometimes I start lying.” Christian Petzold becomes bored with his own voice during press junkets. “I want to tell new stories,” he confesses with a smile. “For example, I said in one interview that the next movie is about homosexual love or something like that. I’m not very professional sometimes.” I had asked him a straightforward, fact-checking question about whether his new film, Afire, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale, would be, as has been widely reported, the second film in a three- or four-film cycle loosely inspired by the elements: water, fire, earth, and sky. “Harun Farocki always said, ‘You know, nowadays, in arthouse cinema, they make movies like modern museums: just one fantastic building with no surroundings,’” he replied. “I love the film…

A film of uncommon warmth and delicacy, Bas Devos’ Here confirms a newfound sense of style and maturity in the Belgian filmmaker’s work that first appeared in the finely tuned nocturne Ghost Tropic (2019). Like that clearly pivotal project, Devos’ fourth feature—which won the top prize in the Encounters section at this year’s Berlinale—finds the 39-year-old director levelling up by scaling down. Gone is the angst and dour social commentary of Violet (2014) and Hellhole (2019), replaced instead with an intimacy borne of a growing interest in the quaint and quotidian. Just as significant, Devos has found a way to channel both the multicultural and generational concerns of his first two films into something far less sweeping and prescriptive. Set over one night, Ghost Tropic follows an elderly Maghrebi cleaning…

I understand the irony of quoting Freud here, of all people, but I’m reminded of a line from Moses and Monotheism: “There was someone in darker times who thought the same as you.” At the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin last summer, curators and scholars Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg mounted the expansive multimedia exhibit No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image—a series focused on non-fiction filmmaking by women between the ’70s and ’90s—a selection of which travelled to Toronto’s TIFF Cinematheque this winter. Global in their scope, Balsom and Peleg are deliberate in their multiplicities, invoking Ella Shohat’s term “plurilogue.” There is no attempt here at universalizing the experience of women—instead, the largesse of the exhibit (which also includes a publication from MIT and a…

The 2023 edition of the Sundance Film Festival wasn’t the worst ever—that would be 2021, when the lousiest movie in the history of major festival-winners, that thing titled Coda, somehow won every prize in sight and never stopped. That annus horribilis also marked the year that Sundance went online (because of you-know-what), and it is now clear that the festival will never be the same again. The latest edition, though not the worst, was certainly the strangest, presenting a hybrid of online and in-person programming, and it was up to you to choose which one (or both) you fancied. I chose a blend of each, partly for efficiency and partly out of a simple desire to return to a live festival with human beings sitting in cinemas. Having deliberately avoided…

The three inaugural releases from Black Zero, a new archival label dedicated to Canadian experimental cinema, are unified by their mystique and uncompromising, adventurous spirit. This new enterprise is particularly exciting because it’s supervised by Stephen Broomer, an author, director, film preservationist, and programmer who has spent many years championing the Canadian avant-garde, and he’s evidently approached this project with the utmost seriousness. Restored and presented on Blu-ray, accompanied by essays and commentaries that provide crucial context and insight, these films are here given the treatment they’ve always deserved. The most immediately exciting work is Palace of Pleasure (1967), a dual-screen film by John Hofsess. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia performance he helped bring to McMaster University in Ontario, Hofsess recognized the sort of sensorial ecstasies…

There are few sights more imprinting than Alexander Skarsgard, nearly nude and with a silicone cap and cheek retractor, pouring himself feet-first into polychromatic sludge. He’s almost unrecognizable in his starkness, eyeballs positively juddering with fear as the room fills with liquid, all so he can elude capital punishment. As with fidelity and morals, the legalities within Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool are elastic. As with the director’s previous films Antiviral (2012) and Possessor (2020), Infinity Pool stages a familiar sci-fi scenario, but rather more dully than do its predecessors. Author James Foster (Skarsgard) and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are visiting a coastal resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa, where the locals are celebrating “Umbramaq,” or “The Summoning,” a festival of friendship and feasting. It’s an indulgent time…

Miike Takashi supposedly believes that there are no bad movies—for him, something of value can be learned from each and every one. I think about that idea often, because I increasingly believe that the definition of a bad film is precisely one that can’t be learned from. Rare is the good bad film that makes a genuine impression on you, one whose ideas seem fatally misguided yet vigorous and authentic. I spend my days dreaming of a world where all bad films are as good as Tori et Lokita. Despite the embarrassed averting of the eyes performed by the collective critical consciousness when the film made its Cannes debut, the latest from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne has nonetheless dutifully continued its tour of the international festival circuit (I caught it…

A semi-scenic, mostly horizontal non-metropolis located about 100 kilometres west-southwest of Toronto, the city of Waterloo (pop. 121,000) has earned a reputation as the Silicon Valley of the North—a close-knit network of tech companies and think tanks encircled by university campuses and a disproportionate number of insurance firms. The latter pile-up is a peculiarity that has led to the city also being dubbed (a bit less sexily) “The Hartford of Canada,” a reference that might have made Matt Johnson’s mid-’90s civic time capsule/corporate origin myth BlackBerry even funnier than it already is. It’s hard, though, to imagine anybody (including the lyricists of ABBA) improving on the script’s best line, which gets shouted proudly by local antihero Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) at a moment of truth in the NHL head offices:…

It is, by now, a given that Angela Schanelec’s films involve insoluble tarrying with opacities at every available level. Consider Blake Williams in Cinema Scope 68: “Like Godard, Schanelec presents us with only enough narrative so that we feel our desire for narrative,” a situation through which “the primacy of interpretative thought in the face of the unknown is, again, affirmed.” Or Giovanni Marchini Camia, in issue 76: “The notion of searching for something essential yet impossible to describe or even fully conceive represents an existential longing that has afflicted all of Schanelec’s characters to date, and which drives the films themselves.” For a some viewers, this is maddening, even unbearable—the work remains remote, a series of finely polished surfaces lacking the usual signifiers that provide points of human attachment.…

“I know it is a great metaphor, but a metaphor for what I could not say.”—Werner Herzog in his recent memoirs about the steamship hoisted over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo (1982) Making a deserved victory lap on the festival circuit around the time of his 80th birthday in September 2022, the ever-prolific and internationally popular Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog, eager to prove that he is not resting on his laurels, came with an entire package of new works in tow, as well as an exhibition of material from his personal archive presented at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. There were not one, but two films: The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022), drawn mostly from footage shot by the two eponymous volcanologists before they met their grisly…

In the modern cinema, the imageless screen assumed a new, decisive importance. No longer there as mere punctuation, or used to simply mark a change of scene, the interstice took on an independent value of its own. To essay its new status, one might contrast the strictly functional stitch points of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) with the transitions of Stan Brakhage’s Reflections on Black (1955), where the interstice between images—the pure black or white screen—serves a reflexive, properly structural value. In the latter, we are no longer dealing with linkages of associated images, but relinkages of independent images across a yawning void. Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, with its emphasis on “what happens in the junctures,” on the joins and ellipses through which poetry “penetrates unaided,” exemplifies this new…

“The night he died I was in a north London nightclub, where I took heroin for the first time. I returned to my south London flat the next morning, threw up, and went straight in to work, where someone immediately told me about his death.” This fragment, the 421st of the 450 that comprise Ian Penman’s engaging new book Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, strikes me as something much more than a “where were you when…” sort of anecdote. It cuts to the core. Arriving late in the game with a stinging force, it sutures together two unrelated events in 1982: an opioid turn in the writer’s early twenties, and the drugged-out expiration of his subject at age 37. Across the book, Penman leans hard on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last days,…

Back in the days of dial-up internet, when I would visit websites with names like badmovies.org and stomptokyo.com on my parents’ computer to teach myself the Psychotronic Cinema canon, the one filmmaker who seemed completely without defenders was Albert Pyun. “If the words boredom and cyborgs ring a bell,” wrote a reviewer for a still-extant website called Sci-Fi Movie Page, “then it’s because they are synonymous with the director Albert Pyun (does it rhyme with pain?), whose other movies such as Nemesis and Cyborg should be banned under the Geneva Convention or something.” This was the sort of critical judgment that still defined Pyun to me as late as 2018, when my friend Justin Decloux told me he was writing a book about the filmmaker and marathoning his complete works.…

Any careful viewing of M. Night Shyamalan’s filmography indicates that the writer-director, now reigning king of his own small fiefdom in what remains of the American movie business, thinks a lot about storytelling. During the period in which he became a pariah—a figure of fun for critics, audiences, and parodists like the creators of South Park—one of his most-mocked films was Lady in the Water (2006), in which the residents of an apartment building band together to safeguard a nymph named Story. These characters learn that they all have prescribed roles to play in a classical myth, roles like the Guardian, the Symbolist, the Healer, and the Guild, all of which sound more like concepts from a screenwriting manual than any recognizable tale from folklore. Critics ridiculed Lady in the…

A culmination of Joao Canijo’s oeuvre, the diptych Bad Living/Living Bad premiered at this year’s Berlinale—the former in the international Competition, where it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize, and the latter in the parallel Encounters competition. The films focus on a hotel from complementary angles: the story of the family running the hotel (Bad Living), and those of the guests who temporarily occupy it (Living Bad). They are pieces of the same ambitious endeavour: to portray motherly love, and how it becomes a suffocating affection. Made with his habitual entourage (Anabela Moreira, Rita Blanco, Cleia Almeida, and Vera Barreto) and an enormous ensemble of additional actors (Madalena Almeida, Nuno Lopes, Filipa Areosa, Leonor Silveira, Rafael Morais, Lia Carvalho, Beatriz Batarda, Carolina Amaral, and Leonor Vasconcelos), Canijo’s latest project is…

Last Things, the latest work from Deborah Stratman, participates in a small but growing trend in experimental filmmaking. Following certain tendencies in contemporary philosophy, Last Things attempts to communicate a radically non-anthropocentric view of existence. But, unlike many popular approaches to this problem—envisioning a world without “us”—Last Things avoids the fashionable fetish for apocalypse. While Stratman’s film does suggest the possibility, even the inevitability, of a world without the human race and all other known fauna, it works to place this development into an equally non-anthropocentric time frame. For geological formations—rocks, sediment, magnetic forces—there is not a “before” and “after” in the way we conceive it. As one of the film’s narrators expresses it, minerals can display elements of the past, signs of what they once were. But they do…

J. Hoberman counted Fire Music among the best films of 2021, but his capsule review sings a different tune: “Not a great documentary,” he begins, “but an effective reminder that…” Say no more. I find it almost touching that a hardcore cineaste like Hoberman should countenance such an ungainly film for the sake of “Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, et al.” For music like that, anything. Still, we might ask of the film itself: why this lack of, well, fire? Director Tom Sturgal organizes his history like a Wikipedia entry, dutifully split between big names and rough chronology. In spite of some remarkable archival material—much of it from earlier films like Ron Mann’s Imagine the Sound (1981) and Robert Mugge’s Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (1980)—the film is in…

There’s a violence inherent in modern medicine—not just in the physical intrusions that take place during a surgical procedure, but in the language of medicine itself. Foucault wrote of the “medical gaze,” a way of looking at the patient’s body through the lens of scientific knowledge, interpreting its visible symptoms and signs using pre-cut terminology and systems of classification. Under this gaze, the body is denuded of personhood, its individual mysteries razed for the greater good; when maladies arise, one can only hope that the doctor has seen it all before, can identify the problem, and relate it to an established index of ailments and remedies. Claire Simon’s Notre corps—which captures the visitations and procedures in the gynecological ward of Paris’s Tenon hospital, a public institution located a few blocks…

Something has always struck me as misogynistic about inquisitions into the autobiographical bases of art made by women, as if art about lived experience is less valuable or less imaginative, and that the experiences of women in particular carry less intellectual weight. But there are instances where autofiction permits storytellers to forget the structural demands of narrative, a fate which befalls the French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love in her latest feature, Un beau matin, whose pat ending doesn’t suit her characters so much as her own memory. Léa Seydoux plays a widowed translator, Sandra, whose work transcends the German lectures and Normandy commemoration ceremonies she dutifully interprets. Sandra’s aging father Georg (Pascal Greggory), once a great philosophy professor, suffers from a neurodegenerative disorder that has robbed him of the cognitive dexterity…

Against hazy landscapes of coastal mountain ranges and lilac clusters of alliums, Riceboy Sleeps begins by announcing the arrival of So-young Kim (Choi Seung-yoon). A recently widowed mother to Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang), who was born out of wedlock and thus unable to attain citizenship, So-young has resettled on the west coast of Canada from Korea to leave behind her grief in pursuit of new beginnings. Her son’s illegitimacy, and her late husband Won-shik’s schizophrenia—which eventually led to his suicide—have been redacted from the family tapestry, even as the curious Dong-hyun probes for answers. Roughly divided into three acts, former TV actor Anthony Shim’s follow-up to his 2019 directorial debut, Daughter, accompanies the mother-son pair as they confront the unrelenting pressures of assimilating into Canada, adopt varying strategies…