CS54

Issue 54 Table of Contents

This is the complete list of articles from magazine issue of Cinema Scope issue 54. 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 Interviews Leaping and Looping…
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Cinema Scope 54 Editor’s Note

By Mark Peranson First of all, apologies for the quality of this issue, and this editor’s note in general. I take full blame when things go wrong at Cinema Scope headquarters, which for the better part of six weeks has been in hotel and conference rooms in Rotterdam, Berlin, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Austin, oh,…
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You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Alain Resnais, France)

By Blake Williams That Alain Resnais would endow his follow-up to his neurologically scrambled masterpiece Les herbes folles (2009) with the title You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet seems like a goad to premature eulogists. As Resnais would be turning 90 a fortnight after the film’s Cannes premiere last year, many journalists in attendance presumptuously deemed…
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Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, US)

By Quintín In one of the first scenes of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), a black soldier stands proudly and defiantly in front of the President and, without technically overstepping the bounds of respectfulness, argues that African-Americans (it sounds ridiculous to use that term in this context, doesn’t it?) deserve pay equal to that of white…
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Exploded View: Ron Rice’s Chumlum

By Chuck Stephens “Her eye saw not just beauty but incredible, delirious, drug-like hallucinatory beauty.” Jack Smith—creature on fire, ruler of lost Atlantis, and author of the bite-sized encomium to the “perfect filmic appositeness” of Maria Montez quoted above—looms before us in a column of late afternoon loft-light, head swaddled in toilet paper, face swallowed…
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Global Discoveries on DVD | Freebies, Purchases, Extras

By Jonathan Rosenbaum One limitation of this column when it comes to overseas releases is that many (if not all) of my selections are determined by which companies send me review copies and which ones don’t. When it comes to the UK, I eventually gave up on Artificial Eye responding to my requests several years…
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Film/Art | Out of Bounds: The Formal Trajectories of Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan

  By Andréa Picard “You have to rack your brain to know how to film a location…You have to walk around it for a while if you want to find, to use a military term, a strategic lookout. There are not many. When you explore this question often enough, you see that, most of the…
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Fire in Every Shot: Wang Bing’s Three Sisters

By Thom Andersen “Films have no interest unless one finds something that burns somewhere within the shot.”—Jean-Marie Straub, Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1984, p. 34 Wang Bing’s Three Sisters (2012) tells a simple story. Three sisters, aged four, six, and ten, live like orphans in Yunnan province, in the village of Xiyangtang (elevation: 3,500 feet;…
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One Horizontal, One Vertical: Some Preliminary Observations on Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster

By Shelly Kraicer The good news about Wong Kar-wai’s new film is that, following the debacle that was My Blueberry Nights (2007), the good Wong is back. The Grandmaster not only banishes the (thankfully now easily forgotten) memory of Blueberry, but also manages to continue building on themes and forms from Wong’s previous films while…
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An Ursine Halfabet: Denis Côté’s Vic+Flo ont vu un ours

By Michael Sicinski In Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012), you might have really seen a bear. That’s because it took place in a zoo. As for his latest, au contraire; the grizzlies are not really there. The title’s both a metaphor and a clue: the phrasing, like a picture book, implies that we should take a…
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Middlegame: An Interview with Andrew Bujalski

By Phil Coldiron Here’s a human point: this little introduction to the following interview with Andrew Bujalski on the occasion of the Sundance and Berlin premieres of his extraordinary new film, Computer Chess, has given me more sleepless nights than just about anything I’ve ever written. In a way that very few films have ever…
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After-School Special: Joseph Kahn’s Detention

By Adam Nayman No American filmmaker in recent years has put his money where his mouth is like Joseph Kahn, the director of music videos for artists including Britney Spears, Destiny’s Child, Eminem, Gwen Stefani, Katy Perry, Kylie Minogue, Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga, U2, and Wu-Tang Clan. These are big names, and for the part…
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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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