Issue 81 - Winter 2020

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
Let’s call this one “Notes Towards an Editor’s Note.” I know that some of you think I’m funny like a clown and I’m here to amuse you, so I hate to disappoint those fair readers looking for the usual belly laugh or two in this quarterly missive. But t
Cinema Scope15 min read
Anything Is Possible
When discussing all-time NBA greats, the knock on Kevin Garnett was always that he couldn’t carry a squad to a championship. For all his unprecedented versatility—the shooting and ball-handling of a guard in the elongated body of a power forward—KG w
Cinema Scope9 min read
I Shall Be Released
Some of the greatest concert footage from the ’70s has only become visible over the course of the previous 12 months, and ended up in two films that couldn’t be more different in their approaches, yet are united in presenting themselves as auteurist
Cinema Scope8 min read
They Are All Equal Now
Since cinema is moving toward television, and since the MCU generation is trying to actually tussle with a good fella like Martin Scorsese, and since all of this is wrapped around a cultural moment steeped in glorious contradictions, the timing of Th
Cinema Scope15 min readWorld
A Concept of Reality
While one might assume that it would be emotionally and morally gratifying to watch the funeral of a tyrant, Sergei Loznitsa’s astounding archival documentary State Funeral challenges that belief. Using magnificently restored footage (both black-and-
Cinema Scope8 min read
Far from Paradise
Diamonds are sharp and hard, rich in myth and violence, soaked in desire, totally under the putrid spell of money. They are, in other words, a lot like Las Vegas—especially as it appears in Nina Menkes’ searing 1991 film Queen of Diamonds. Across 75
Cinema Scope8 min read
Garden Against the Machine
Ja’Tovia Gary’s filmmaking is all to some extent grappling with the question of identity, particularly its precariousness in an often hostile world. Early films such as Cakes Da Killa: No Homo (2013) and An Ecstatic Experience (2015) explore the comp
Cinema Scope16 min read
Fairytales and Freudian Females
With five features, two mid-length films, and one video installation to her name over 24 years, Jessica Hausner has evolved from a maker of hermetic psychodramas to an internationally minded auteur whose meticulously detailed character portraits beli
Cinema Scope10 min read
Training to Failure
Toronto in the ’70s was a mid-size Protestant town with a penchant for puritanical by-laws (you couldn’t buy a drink on a Sunday unless you were having a sit-down meal), which made it an unlikely home for a thriving artistic community devoted to the
Cinema Scope11 min read
Works and Days
Now, let us imagine the watchmen of twin poles. One asks, “How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’” The other responds, “D’autre part le cinéma est un langage.” Let us station the latter at the North, a
Cinema Scope5 min read
Collective
As the opening credits of Alexander Nanau’s Collective rolled at a screening at TIFF, a fellow critic leaned to me and whispered, in a mantra-like tone, the name of an indelible Chinese documentary: Karamay. The implied message was tacitly understood
Cinema Scope5 min readCrime & Violence
Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be
There is an unprecedented element in the new Franco Maresco film, Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be (La Mafia non è più quella di una volta): the female element. For the first time in the 30-year career of the Sicilian director (with or without h
Cinema Scope5 min read
Ne Croyez Surtout Pas Que Je Hurle
For a film that reveals its formal conceit from the outset and never deviates, Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle is remarkably complicated. Frank Beauvais’ first feature-length work opens with a simple intertitle, stating that he watched over 400 fi
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Painted Bird
Seventy-five years after the liberation of the camps, how do we remember the Holocaust? Those who lived through it won’t be around to testify for much longer, and in our era of viral disinformation, history must be considered up for grabs, alt-truths
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Twentieth Century
William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s tenth and longest-serving prime minister, is an emblem of our nation’s repressed, ineffectual masculinity. A staunch centrist and bureaucrat, Mackenzie King accomplished little during his 22 years in office: his
Cinema Scope5 min read
A Voluntary Year
Apart from extending the recent streak of exemplary features from directors grouped (sometimes contentiously) under the Berlin School banner, A Voluntary Year continues the Teutonic tradition of the auteurist small-screen work. A television commissio
Cinema Scope5 min read
White Lie
After 2019’s summer of scammers, from the fall of Elizabeth Holmes to the false starts of Caroline Calloway, the cold industrial winter of Hamilton feels particularly harsh. The glossy cautionary fables of the warmer months are long gone, and instead
Cinema Scope9 min read
Calíwood My Hometown
Just a week before his death this past September, Colombian filmmaker Luis Ospina posted his final status update on Facebook: “Este remake de Todo comenzó por el fin que estoy viviendo no se lo recomiendo a nadie. Nunca segundas partes fueron mejores
Cinema Scope6 min read
Silence Is Falling
The recent exhibition at Milan’s Museo del Novecento, Light Movement: The Experimental Cinema of Marinella Pirelli (curated by Lucia Aspesi and Iolanda Ratti), has allowed for a long-overdue critical and institutional reassessment of a perennially un
Cinema Scope6 min read
Où Est Le Cinéma?
Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work starts promisingly. The discussion of Sontag’s childhood and early youth in California is extremely detailed, so much so that one starts to understand why Moser needs 705 pages of text and another 111 pages
Cinema Scope10 min read
Progressive and “Progressive”
Some of Roman Polanski’s early features—Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Tess (1979)—are centred on vulnerable women, but as Bitter Moon (1992) makes abundantly clear, these are all films predicated on the male gaze, as are the more rece
Cinema Scope5 min read
Jojo Rabbit
“Don’t get into the Nazi stuff,” Taika Waititi’s deadbeat dad tells his son, the eponymous protagonist of the New Zealand-born actor-writer-director’s sophomore feature Boy (2010), gesturing to a swastika he once carved into the wall of his childhood
Cinema Scope4 min read
Ad Astra
The artistic compromises that come with working on a mid-budget film like Ad Astra are inevitable. While it’s less money than the hundreds of millions that go into major studio blockbuster fare, it’s a significant jump from the more modest scope of J
Cinema Scope5 min read
Mister America
Mister America, in keeping with its associated web series On Cinema at the Cinema, treats the feature-film format as no more inherently worthy of respect than any other. In part this is owed to the accidental origin of the movie, which was conceived
Cinema Scope5 min read
Portrait De La Jeune Fille En Feu
The very title of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu seeks to pin down the unpinnable: to fix a flame in place. Céline Sciamma’s 18thcentury romance centres on the innate slipperiness of condensing someone’s presence into oil on canvas, a process in w
Cinema Scope5 min read
In Fabric
A surreal, sensuous fever dream rendered in the most lurid shades and textures, In Fabric succeeds first and foremost as a tragicomedy about a cursed commodity. As he explores and regards his chosen nexus of eroticism and consumerism with a fervent m
Cinema Scope3 min read
Peter Emanuel Goldman’s Pestilent City
Structurally ambiguous and romantically rancid, Peter Emanuel Goldman’s 1965 Pestilent City is a 15-minute, high-contrast black-and-white New York City scherzo of sleaze, dereliction, working stiffs, stumblebums, loitering, malingering, playing, and

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