CS59

Issue 59 Table of Contents

This is the complete list of articles from the print magazine issue of Cinema Scope #59. We post selected articles from each issue on the site. For the complete content please subscribe to the magazine, or consider the instant digital download version. Articles available free online are linked below. FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS *Declarations of Independence: A Conversation Between Alex Ross Perry…
Read More

Declarations of Independence: A Conversation Between Alex Ross Perry and Joel Potrykus

I first encountered Joel Potrykus’ Ape (2012) when I was a jury member for the Filmmakers of the Present competition at Locarno. As it was the sole American narrative film in the selection, my curiosity was piqued before the festival even began. Ape was a revelation, and the jury agreed: we awarded Joel the Best…
Read More

Diary of a Mad Housewife: Robert Greene’s Actress

By Adam Nayman “I tend to break things,” says Brandy Burre early on in Actress, and Robert Greene’s film gives her plenty of opportunities to validate this claim. An aggressively stylized profile of a former ensemble player on The Wire who now lives with her husband and two young children in sleepy Beacon, New York,…
Read More

Deborah Stratman: Safe and Sound

By Samuel La France “Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.”—Samuel Butler Since I’ve never lived in an earthquake zone—or a war zone, for that matter—the subtle and persistent tremors of Deborah Stratman’s installation Tactical Uses of a Belief in the Unseen (2), mounted at Toronto’s Mercer Union during the 25th Images Festival,…
Read More

Each Memory Creates Its Own Legend: The Films of John Torres

By Max Nelson John Torres has the sensibility of a romantic poet, the mode of address of a personal essayist, and an anthropologist’s curious, lingering, critical eye. His four features—all shot on miniscule budgets with the help of modest grants, cheap digital equipment, and, in one case, expired film stock—count among the central achievements of…
Read More

Cannes 2014: Who Let the Dogs Out? 

...another Cannes film festival whose lineup reads like it could have been cobbled together by a computer programmed with Frémaux DNA...
Read More

Cannes 2014 | Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

By Blake Williams. The first on-screen text in Toutes les histoires (1988), the first chapter of Histoire(s) du cinéma, reads (as translated), “May each eye negotiate for itself.” Presented while Godard pronounces another maxim (“Don’t show every side of things; allow yourself a margin for the indefinite”), this text effectively prepares us for the spectatorial…
Read More

Cannes 2014 | Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Mexico/Denmark/France/Germany/USA/Brazil)

By Quintín After the completion of his “Lonely Men Trilogy” of La libertad (2001), Los muertos (2004), and Liverpool (2008), people started to say that Lisandro Alonso should do something different. Jauja answers that request: it’s a film with an international star (Viggo Mortensen), features characters who speak in full sentences, and boasts a script…
Read More

Cannes 2014 | Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/Germany/France)

By Jordan Cronk Seemingly preordained, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s overdue Palme d’Or win provided a nonetheless satisfying conclusion to a rather undramatic Cannes film festival—and, further, to a closing awards ceremony of otherwise empty gestures and mostly uninspired selections. A two-time recipient of the Grand Prix for Distant (2002) and Once Upon a Time in…
Read More

Cannes 2014 | The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/Germany)

By Tom Charity For those “in the know,” the Grand Jury Prize accorded to Alice Rohrwacher’s second film was the one surprise on a night where Jane Campion’s jury otherwise played things safe and sure, dispensing awards with dutiful nods to all sides. (Libération described it as the one prize with the flavour of a…
Read More

Cannes 2014 | Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello, France)

By Boris Nelepo “Names, no doubt, are whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so unlike the reality that we often experience a kind of stupour when we have before our eyes in place of the imagined, the visible world (which, for that matter, is not the real world, our…
Read More

Issue 59 Editor’s Note

Another year, another two weeks wasted on the Riviera, but at least I got a tan. By now there’s no need to dwell on my feelings about the Festival de Cannes—any regular reader of this esteemed magazine knows them well enough. Yet despite my annual fear of repetition—and by this point there’s little I can…
Read More

Deaths of Cinema | The World in His Arms: Michael Glawogger, 1959-2014

By Christoph Huber “The theatre is not a classroom, so there is nothing to learn. But there is a lot to see,” Michael Glawogger quipped at the Flaherty seminar in 2010—just one of many choice aphorisms given (not just) on that occasion, demonstrating several of the unique gifts of this one-of-a-kind Austrian director. He not…
Read More

Global Discoveries on DVD: Extras, Promos, Prices

By Jonathan Rosenbaum I shelled out $56.19 US (including postage) to acquire the definitive and restored, director-approved DVD of Providence (1977) from French Amazon, and I hasten to add that this was money well spent. Notwithstanding the passion and brilliance of Alain Resnais’ first two features, Providence is in many ways my favourite of his…
Read More

Stop the Pounding Heart (Roberto Minervini, USA/Italy/Belgium

By Jay Kuehner Faith, so often deployed as narrative substance, is a phenomenon (or noumenon) that’s difficult to represent with film. It is often reduced to milieu, mood, or mere matter: think transcendental styles and stylized transcendance, either abstractly implied or imposed in formulary fashion (Bresson’s ascetic methodology vis-à-vis Malick’s metaphysical morass). A character either…
Read More