This is the complete list of articles from magazine issue of Cinema Scope issue 56. We post a few selected articles from each issue on the site. For the complete content, and to help Cinema Scope continue, please subscribe to the magazine, or consider the instant digital download version. * Articles available available free online Fall Festival Preview Interviews The Beauty of Horror…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum A note to readers of jonathanrosenbaum.com: from now on please go to jonathanrosenbaum.net. 1. IL CINEMA RITROVATO (Bologna) DVD AWARDS 2013 X edition Jurors: Lorenzo Codelli, Alexander Horwath, Mark McElhatten, Paolo Mereghetti, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, chaired by Peter von Bagh Because we were faced this year with an embarrassment of riches, we adopted a…

By Francisco Ferreira Where do films come from? I won’t fixate too long on this question, as no one is qualified to answer it. There are films that are more unexpected than others, that’s for sure. Sometimes, there are even films that seem to have come from nothing, that sprout up like stalks of wild…

…and the Eastern Europe Fetus Taxing Japan Brides in West Coast Places Sucking Alabama Air By Chuck Stephens “The most memorable sequence of [Chinese] Firedrill, possibly one of the great scenes in the history of film, involves [Will] Hindle lying in anguish on his floor and slowly reaching out with one hand toward the glimmering…

By Michael Sicinski With its very title, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a film that announces itself as being in league with forces not entirely of this world. Nevertheless, its makers are two of the leading lights of contemporary experimental cinema precisely because of their pellucid examination of the world around them.…

By Mark Peranson “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”—Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1964) Cinema Scope: Let me repeat what I wrote about your film, namely that for me Story…

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…

By Blake Williams The title of Tsai Ming-liang’s tenth feature Stray Dogs bears a fairly conspicuous resemblance to a key metaphor from Laozi’s 6th-century Chinese philosophical text Tao Te Ching, which allegorizes man’s relationship with the heavens as that of a straw dog and the one who created it. Literally a dog-shaped figure made out…

By Jay Kuehner Pilgrimage is premised on the idea that the sacred is not entirely immaterial, but that there is a geography of spiritual power. Pilgrimage walks a delicate line between the spiritual and the material in its emphasis on the story and its setting: though the search is for spirituality, it is pursued in…

By Phil Coldiron What comes at the end of cinema? Not what comes after cinema—a good question for marketing gurus like Spielberg and Lucas and Cameron to lock themselves in a room and argue over until they expire, choking on their own hot air—but right there at the end, in death tranquil or terrifying or…

By Jordan Cronk As an agent for acclimation, alcohol is one of our most proven resources. In the cinema of Hong Sangsoo, it’s less a casual commodity than a conduit for conducive social interaction, a property of both emotionally collateral and physically direct engagement. The characters portrayed in the prolific South Korean auteur’s work drink…

By Quintín More than 800,000 people follow Alejandro Jodorowsky on Twitter. Every day these lucky people get a couple of dozen pearls of wisdom (in Spanish) such as, “If you hate walls, you should learn to build doors,” or “The Visible longs for the Invisible, the Invisible longs for the Visible. You are also what…

By Adam Nayman You can probably trace the idea—or at least the exact etymology—of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave” back to a 2011 Guardian article by Steve Rose. In it, the author sagely mused that “the world’s most messed-up country is making the world’s most messed-up cinema.” Of course, the movies that prompted Rose’s declaration—Yorgos…

By Jason Anderson Any viewer in need of a primer on the semiotics of the giallo film will be well-served by the opening moments of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears. In commencing their second full-length effort after their similarly arresting debut Amer (2009), the Belgian husband-and-wife team of Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet…

By Andréa Picard “Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.”—Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert, 1832 “How, in A.D. 1988, is it that human ingenuity has been unable, firstly…