Issue 76 - Fall 2018

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
The night that Mariano Llinás arrived in Locarno, I ran into him drinking with his producer Laura Citarella and a few friends, occupying a few tables in a streetside café. Soon after I joined them, I asked Llinás the most pressing question in my mind
Cinema Scope22 min read
Teller of Tales
To begin, a question: What exactly is La Flor? It’s a pertinent query, albeit one with no easy answer, so let’s break it down. The first thing to know about La Flor is that, yes, it’s a 14-hour-long film—868 minutes to be exact, including intermissio
Cinema Scope7 min read
Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles
On the basis of Les démons (2015) and his latest film Genèse—I haven’t caught up yet with Copenhague, a Love Story (2016) or his documentaries—Saint-Apagit-born writer-director Philippe Lesage is already one of the strongest stylists in Canadian cine
Cinema Scope9 min read
Touch Me I’m Sick
The phony magazine cover glimpsed in the early moments of Her Smell may not have the same heady metatextual allure as that of so many journals invented out of whole cloth and newsprint for narrative purposes, like the must-read issues of Dorgon and K
Cinema Scope11 min read
Everything Transitory Is But an Image
When Goethe wrote his Faust, adapting the German legend about a scholar who makes a pact with the Devil to attain total knowledge, could he have foreseen how incisive his indictment of human hubris would be across epochs? How durable his critique of
Cinema Scope12 min read
Hidden Lives and Quiet Passion
An eternal mystery surrounds the steely German-tinged name John M. Stahl. Undeniably a director of note, his work remains something of a secret, as does much of his life, with himself being not the most reliable narrator. Stahl was born in Baku to Ru
Cinema Scope8 min read
No Emperor, Only an Empress
The opening montage of the Catherine the Great biopic The Scarlet Empress (1934)—the fifth of six films made by Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich at Paramount between 1930 and 1935, which have recently been released as a box set from the Crite
Cinema Scope16 min readWorld
A Banished Life
It’s understandable why Ying Liang would cautiously describe his latest film, A Family Tour, as only “semi-autobiographical.” There are, indeed, marked differences between him and his protagonist, a dissident Chinese filmmaker called Yang Shu travell
Cinema Scope7 min read
The Cracks Of The World
China’s growing economic clout and rising prominence in world affairs can help illuminate some essential if unflattering traits of the business we call show. Not even a decade ago, any mention of China was usually made in relation to the draconian ce
Cinema Scope10 min read
First Person Plural
It begins with a death, of course, the first of the many quotations, slips, and rhymes coursing through The Other Side of the Wind, now finally arrived, more than 50 years after word of its conception first entered public circulation, in a saleable f
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Business of Horror
The latest rejiggering of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) will be premiering soon after this issue hits the stands, and while it doesn’t exactly put the franchise founder front and centre—he’s ceremoniously included in the credits as an executive-p
Cinema Scope8 min read
Beyond Good and Evil
We need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that Damon Packard doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Of course it seems utterly random and perhaps even a bit ill-fitting to begin an analysis of one of America’s most truly inde
Cinema Scope15 min read
Mass Ornaments
I only first met Jodie Mack—one of the most imaginative, hardest-working, and all-around best filmmakers in the game, experimental or otherwise—two Septembers ago. It was a Sunday, the day before I turned 31, and the night ended with her leading the
Cinema Scope8 min read
On No Thing
A shot of the azure sky, luminous and expansive, is how Godard opens his “second first film” Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), which was released two decades after the start of the nouvelle vague and serves as the effective zero point of so-called “lat
Cinema Scope10 min read
Auteurist Updates
Paul Verhoeven gives exceptionally good audio commentary, especially on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Spetters (1980), a powerful feature about teenage motocross racers in a small Dutch town that I’ve just seen for the first time. Speaking in English, V
Cinema Scope8 min read
Keep the Faith
Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw has long been interested in cinematic trips, most often of the psychedelic variety. Across a number of film and video shorts, installations, performances, and photo works, as well as a notable parallel career as a musician
Cinema Scope5 min read
Diary Of A Lost Generation
“Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft do go together,” Jan-Christopher Horak states flatly in a 2016 interview that Criterion has included as a supplement on their recently released edition of the latter film (#908 to its partner’s #907 in the label’s se
Cinema Scope5 min read
Transit
Christian Petzold’s progressive drift away from realism gathers pace in Transit, another melodrama of impossibility and despair that unfolds in a hyper-constructed amalgam of past and present as unstable as it is seamless. Yet the deliberately unreso
Cinema Scope5 min read
Sorry to Bother You
Taking place in a California not unlike the one we know, comedian and Coup frontman Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry to Bother You takes the repellent fantasies of our late-capitalist, fake-news world—one that is constantly on the brink but neve
Cinema Scope4 min read
The Load
The debut fiction feature by Ognjen Glavonic is the second time that the Serbian writer-director, who lived through the Yugoslav wars as a child, has explored the same shocking incident from the time of the Kosovo conflict. In his feature-length docu
Cinema Scope3 min read
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty
Though not primarily known as a filmmaker, the great earthworks artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) had cinematic inclinations, implicit and explicit. A line or two of pointed film criticism from his journals can be found in his collected writing, pub
Cinema Scope5 min read
Blaze
Unless you count the brief appearances of an angry young drug addict with a gun and three glad-handing Texas oilmen who offer the rambling, gifted troubadour Blaze Foley a shady deal to record on their new label, Zephyr—aptly named, since the whole v

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