Andrew Tracy

Gag Orders: The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Judas and the Black Messiah

Bobby Seale makes a cameo of sorts midway through Judas and the Black Messiah, as Martin Sheen’s porcine J. Edgar Hoover—checking in personally on the progress of the FBI’s campaign against Chicago Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya)—is shown an artist’s sketch of the BPP’s national chairman gagged and shackled in the courtroom during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. This revolting spectacle understandably serves as the mid-film dramatic highpoint of The Trial of the Chicago 7, when the repeated, suitably indignant demands by Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to serve as his own defense counsel in the absence of his hospitalized lawyer—and presiding judge Julius Hoffman’s (Frank Langella) incredible refusal to grant this right, instead directing that Seale’s defense should be undertaken by the representatives for the other defendants—ultimately lead to him being bodily removed from the courtroom by marshals and returned in chains. That image of a defiant Black man, forcibly silenced and immobilized in a hall of American justice, became one of William Burroughs’ “frozen moment[s] at the end of the newspaper fork,” when everyone—including those who would applaud it—can see what they’re being fed.
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F for Fake: Mank

By Andrew Tracy “I am very happy to accept this award in the spirit in which the screenplay was written—which is to say, in the absence of Orson Welles,” snarks Gary Oldman’s Herman Mankiewicz in the recreated newsreel that caps off Mank, as he receives the Best Screenplay Oscar he acrimoniously shared with Welles for…
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A Pierce of the Action: On Claudine and Uptight

By Andrew Tracy In his Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes identified two elements at work in the act of viewing photographs. On one level was what he labelled the studium, which he defines as a sympathetic interest on the part of the viewer, “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, but without special acuity…To recognize the studium…
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Silence (Martin Scorsese, US/Taiwan/Mexico)

By Andrew Tracy  Silence is Martin Scorsese’s best film in 20 years—since Kundun (1997), in fact, which also happens to be the last of his films to focus primarily on matters spiritual. In claiming this, I have no desire to put forth a return-to-form narrative to counter that of the Scorsese acolytes, for whom the…
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Before the Swarm:  David Bordwell’s The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture

  By Andrew Tracy A friend recently pigeonholed me after he witnessed an onstage film critics panel and demanded I make amends for wasting his time—not because I had in any way obliged him to attend, but simply because I was guilty by association. “What’s the point of critics talking about criticism?” he demanded, which…
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Blackhat, White Noise: Michael Mann’s System of Objects

By Andrew Tracy There’s a line very early on in Jonathan Rayner’s recent monograph The Cinema of Michael Mann: Vice and Vindication that stands in marked contrast to the staid though commendably solid study that follows. Comparing Mann’s oeuvre to the framework of genre revisionism that characterized much of the ’70s “New Hollywood” American cinema,…
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Temps mort: Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive

By Andrew Tracy “I’m sick of it—these zombies, what they’ve done to the world, their fear of their own imaginations,” laments the vampiric Adam (Tom Hiddleston) via videophone to his similarly succubal, Tangier-dwelling lady love Eve (Tilda Swinton) early in Only Lovers Left Alive. Zeitgeist be damned, nevertheless it’s fitting that the predominant pop-cultural ghouls…
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Mud (Jeff Nichols, US)

By Andrew Tracy A ways back, in Cinema Scope’s saddle-stitched days, I speculated (à propos Eagle Pennell’s excellent The Whole Shootin’ Match [1978]) on the curious dynamic between regional and “national” (i.e., New York and Los Angeles) filmmaking in the US. The fact is that the majority of successful regional filmmakers do not remain regional…
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Trash Humping: On “Vulgar Auteurism”

From “Vulgar Auteurism: The Case of Michael Mann” (Cinema Scope #40, Fall 2009): [Vulgar auteurism] is one of the defining traits of latter-day cinephilia, with whole fleets of past and present studio craftsmen, from the competent to the questionable, being elevated high above their stations via tendentious interpretations of thematic consistency and a specious formalism…
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Passion (Brian De Palma, France/Germany)

By Andrew Tracy Allow for the possibility that perspective can trump prejudice, I suppose. Eight months after seeing Brian De Palma’s Passion and thinking it ludicrous (probably intentional) and dreadful (presumably not), I’ve since scaled it back to the former—though the fact that it isn’t dreadful does not ipso facto mean it’s any fucking good.…
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Reboot, Rebirth, Repeat: Skyfall

By Andrew Tracy The problem with the Daniel Craig era of Bond is that it refuses to get started—or rather, is compelled to restart itself with each entry. The franchise overhaul of Casino Royale (2006) was an object lesson in how to pull off these “reboots” successfully, paying homage to the character’s legacy while pointing…
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Après mai (Olivier Assayas, France)

As one is virtually a companion piece to the other, it is only natural to begin discussion of Après mai (Something in the Air) with Olivier Assayas’ 2002 memoir A Post-May Adolescence, just published in an elegant English translation by the Austrian Filmmuseum to accompany their new, Kent Jones-edited anthology on Assayas. Eloquent and thoughtful,…
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Bong Joon-ho

By Andrew Tracy The overlap (or fusion) between genre and “art” cinema, and the language in which we discuss them, is one of the defining traits of contemporary cinephilia and criticism. Not that that’s anything new; as with most things in our endlessly reiterative culture, it’s an accentuation of long-established trends and traditions, novel only…
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Shame (Steve McQueen, UK)

By Andrew Tracy At the midpoint of Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008), what had heretofore been a largely dialogue-free immersion into the sights, sounds, and smells of an Irish prison takes a pointed interlude for a veritable torrent of discourse. In a lengthy, unbroken two-shot followed by two shorter close-ups, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father…
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Currency | Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, US)

By Andrew Tracy If “indie-ness” conveys a certain generic intimation unto itself, some of the most celebrated recent independent films have also strategically adopted broader generic tactics, usually related to violence. As sensation, whether shockingly enacted or tautly withheld, has started to become an ever more important element for independents to attract the necessary attention,…
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Spotlight | Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland/Norway/Ireland/Hungary)

By Andrew Tracy One of the more interesting of the teapot tempests that erupted at Toronto this year was the slightly botched press screening of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing, assigned to a noticeably low-capacity theatre that left several clamouring journalists shut out. What’s interesting is not the habitual logistical miscalculations familiar to any festival, but…
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Spotlight | Oki’s Movie (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

By Andrew Tracy Much of the best cinema today almost seems discontent with the idea of being only cinema—or “cinema” in the sense of an immersive narrative world contained within the durational boundaries of a single feature film. The distrust of classical narrative evidenced by many of the best contemporary filmmakers corresponds with their efforts…
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Features | The Poetics of Departure: Kurosawa at 100

By Andrew Tracy Gauging an artist’s relevance is always a highly subjective affair, particularly as there are any number of ways in which such measurement can be made. The lure of the new—or rather, the previously undiscovered or underappreciated—has been a potent force in cinephilia over the last several years, yielding up scores of hosanna-ready…
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Web Only | TIFF 2009: Autumn Leavings

By Andrew Tracy You may consult the issue proper (or issues past) for much of what actually matters in this season’s festival crop; see here some scraps from the Toronto table, richly appointed though they are. White Material. Though the reaction to Claire Denis’ latest has been decidedly mixed—with a quite understandable initial disappointment almost…
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Spotlight | Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, Israel)

Whatever else it might be, the high-concept festival film is a wonderful labour-saving device for the harried critic, its provocatively sellable 25-words-or-less concept handily reducing criticism to bare surface description plus an appropriate adjective. “Gripping” was the mot en vogue for the appreciative critical ranks filing out of my screening of Lebanon, which took the…
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DVD Bonus | Region Central: The Whole Shootin’ Match

By Andrew Tracy In an inadvertent but very real way, the term “regional filmmaking” denotes not only a diminutive mode of film practice in an economic sense, but in an aesthetic sense as well. Those very virtues for which these films are valued—a sense of place, of local, lived-in specificity, a freshness of detail, idiom,…
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Spotlight | Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)

By Andrew Tracy For filmmakers as for comedians, dying is easy—creating is hard. Those with the good sense to opt for a tragically early departure can gain much from the transaction. Not only does their work acquire a coherent narrative line and a tangible set of clichés for their immortalizers to endlessly dissect (think Pasolini,…
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Features | Inside/Out: A Modest Proposal Concerning William A. Wellman

By Andrew Tracy It’s the rare critic these days who speaks of limits. Paul Schrader’s fusty musings in Film Comment or Quintín’s notion of “anorexic vs. bulimic cinema” (see Cinema Scope 22) are rather anomalous in calling for boundaries of artistic achievement, however conventionally in the former case and eccentrically in the latter. Meanwhile, Manny…
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Features | Beyond Brut: The Art of Cornel Wilde

Andrew Tracy Celebrating the primal and primitive in cinema is a convenient fiction of criticism. To speak of a medium entirely premised on advanced technology as if it were an eruption from a bloodily liberated id—as if camera, crew, and equipment were merely the tactile extensions of the Neanderthal artist’s fingers smearing paint against the…
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Interviews | Subverting the Moment: James Gray on We Own the Night

By Andrew Tracy   As with most critical shorthand, “classical” is a much-abused and little-examined term, an abdication of description but a positive boon for instant classification. It functions handily as both light praise and implicit condescension, the traditional scorn for the “well-made” narrative film incarnated in yet another of its protean modes. While general…
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Web Only | TIFF 2007: Places of Rest

By Andrew Tracy While I don’t have the globetrotting experience to draw such a conclusion legitimately, I’ve no doubt that Toronto is little better than any other festival for creating a genuine dialogue about films viewed during, or even keeping a record straight in one’s own overstuffed head. Passing encounters in lobbies yield just enough…
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Features | German Dreams: Some Thoughts on Fassbinder’s Berlin and Syberberg’s Hitler

By Andrew Tracy The monumental film so easily inspires prostration rather than investigation, though surely that is at least partly the intention of its maker. Issuing from within a matrix of production geared towards certain regulations of duration, content, and legitimate claims on audience attention, the monumental film explodes that packaging to present itself in…
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Features | Out of Time: Notes on Marker

By Andrew Tracy An oeuvre made up of fragments naturally spawns fragmentation in its wake, but the erratic and haphazard appearance of Chris Marker’s films on DVD is less a distortion of his work than a peculiarly apt form of presentation. The least proprietary of filmmakers, Marker nevertheless seems immune to misrepresentation. Regardless of his…
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Currency | Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, USA) By Andrew Tracy For those who haven’t yet read the latest issue of the online magazine Rouge, proceed there to witness Kent Jones, in his article “Can Movies Think?”, knocking out another support beam from the already rickety edifice of critical self-justification. Jones’ brief, pinpoint-accurate dissection of the “moral-aesthetic…
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Currency | The Limits of Control

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, Spain/US/Japan) By Andrew Tracy The title’s wholly disingenuous, of course. The Limits of Control is not only rigorously ordered from moment one, it’s also positively overflowing with theoretical pleasures for the self-identifying cinephile. A shame then that those pleasures remain almost exclusively in the realm of theory. Strange that…
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