Cinema Scope Magazine

FEATURES The Play for Tomorrow: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe by Michael Sicinski The Crowd is Dead, Long Live the Crowd! by Erika Balsom All the Fountains of the Great Deep: Artavazd Pelechian’s La Nature by Phil Coldiron Minority Report: Armond White Wants to Make Spielberg Great Again by Adam Nayman F for Fake: Mank by Andrew Tracy Minimalist Maximalism: The Hilarious Horror of Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow by Christoph Huber I Thought I Was Seeing Palestinians: On Kamal Aljafari by Kaleem Hawa The Limbs of Satan: A Century of Flappers on Film by Alicia Fletcher Juliet Berto, où êtes vous? by Steve Macfarlane FALL FESTIVAL SPOTLIGHT Beginning by Lawrence Garcia The Calming by Courtney Duckworth City Hall by Josh Cabrita Genus Pan by Jesse Cumming Her Socialist Smile by Read more →

By Michael Sicinski One of the best known of Steve McQueen’s early video works is Deadpan (1997), a four-minute, 35-second loop in which the artist simultaneously places himself in harm’s way and in film history. The piece is a recreation of the famous Buster Keaton stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) in which the façade of a two-story wooden house falls in on Buster. The performer isn’t crushed by the falling structure because he is standing in the exact position for the window to fall around him, engulfing Keaton in destruction but sparing him as he displays his trademark unflappability.  In McQueen’s version, the event is shown from multiple perspectives—profile, 3/4 angle, bird’s-eye—as well as being fragmented into close-ups of the artist’s feet, face, and Read more →

Les misérables By Erika Balsom for RMC 1.  It was a total coincidence and yet it felt freighted with meaning: when I returned to the cinema at the end of August after months of suffering with the small screen, the first two films I saw began with crowd scenes.  The streets of London were eerily empty as I walked to the Genesis, but as soon as Les misérables (2019) began, the streets of Paris were full. France had won the 2018 World Cup and the city was alive with celebration. The image of so many young people of colour waving so many French flags was a succinct and spectacular way for director Ladj Ly to stage the problem of national belonging and its relation to Read more →

By Phil Coldiron Artists who write clearly about their work run a serious risk: that they will be taken at their word. In much of contemporary art this dynamic has descended to the point that the work, the sensuous object, functions as little more than an illustration of the artist’s statement, a vestigial offering to the market. Anxiety over the uncertain presence of an audience demands that whoever arrives in the role of beholder must not walk away without the supposed satisfaction of knowing precisely what they have encountered.  I begin here for two reasons. The first is that the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian is the author of one of the great autotheoretical texts, “Montage-at-a-Distance, or: A Theory of Distance” (my quotes from the piece Read more →

By Adam Nayman The “About the Author” section of Armond White’s new critical anthology does not disappoint. In the space of four short paragraphs, White is identified as “esteemed, controversial and brilliantly independent” as well as “The Last Honest Film Critic in America”; his résumé comprises “auspicious tomes” that are “essential for anyone who loves pop culture.” These collected works, including 1995’s actually essential The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World, affirm that “White practically invented the art of music video criticism.” His Lincoln Center seminars on that topic (a few of which are still viewable on YouTube) are memorialized in language borrowed, humorously if not deliberately, from the opening of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” No less than the Misses Morkan’s Read more →

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 Citizen Kane (1941). It’s hardly necessary to point out that, while Welles himself (as capably impersonated by English actor Tom Burke) is only an intermittent physical presence in David Fincher’s film (which he directed from a decades-old script by his late father Jack Fincher), the entire enterprise exists under his shadow. Welles aficionado Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote of “how mythical and ideological a creature Welles remains [as a cultural figure], Read more →

By Kaleem Hawa At the end of Kamal Aljafari’s latest film, An Unusual Summer, the Palestinian filmmaker recalls a memory from his childhood, centred on the communal garden outside of his home in the city of Ramlah, a 30-minute drive southeast of Tel Aviv: As a child I spent summerclimbing the fig treefilling straw baskets with green figsbig as applesMy sister was more courageousthan meOur bodies itching from the fig leavesMy uncle Issa came back one dayI overheard that the Red Crossallowed him to visit his motherIt was a hot summerperhaps Augusthe spent every day in the gardencleaning and diggingaround the fig treeBefore he left he engraved my nameon the fig treeYears later the bulldozers cameuprooted the garden and tree Aljafari’s father Abedeljalil, who turned Read more →

By Lawrence Garcia Beginning opens with a sermon on the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac, delivered to a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Georgia’s predominantly Orthodox Christian Caucasus region. Just as the preacher, David (Rati Oneli), starts to expound on its implications regarding belief, the Kingdom Hall is firebombed by unseen attackers, transforming the becalmed sanctuary into a hellish crucible. Taken together with the scene’s violent shift and director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s already evident fixed-frame aesthetic, this invocation of Abraham’s radical leap of faith, which spans the breach between murder and sacrifice, might seem to presage an exploration of religious experience, or a sociocultural study of religious prejudice. But in Kulumbegashvili’s consummately composed feature debut, faith isn’t so much the central subject as it is, Read more →

By Courtney Duckworth Inertia implies stillness, but more precisely it means that without intervention any body resists change. The word conjures ceaseless motion as much as it does stasis—someone who cannot go on, or someone who can do nothing else. Something of this semantic tension imbues The Calming, writer-director Song Fang’s ascetic second feature. Lin (Qi Xi), also a filmmaker, neither works nor rests but drifts, boarding buses and trains, wandering verdurous forests and lamplit, unpeopled streets, across Tokyo, Niigata, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Nanjing. Now and then she sojourns with loved ones or promotes her latest film about trees: life forms that likewise commingle rootedness and sway. Images of trees bookend The Calming: first a digital still projected onto a gallery wall—Lin asks the Read more →

By Jesse Cumming Marking Lav Diaz’s return to Venice four years and two features after winning the Golden Lion for the nearly four-hour The Woman Who Left, Genus Pan has invited easy jokes about its relative brevity by Diaz standards, clocking in as it does at a relatively efficient 156 minutes—even though it is, in fact, a nearly fivefold expansion of the 36-minute Hugaw, Diaz’s contribution to the 2018 omnibus film Lakbayan (Journey), which also featured episodes from Brillante Mendoza and Kidlat Tahimik. This shift in scale has also elicited a shift away from the pointed political critique that has featured in much of Diaz’s recent work: last year’s The Halt has acquired even greater cultural currency in light of the COVID-19 crisis, with its speculative-future Read more →

By Jordan Cronk In a year when even the most perfunctorily political film has been deemed newly relevant, it’s a 58-minute observational documentary from 2007 that, by quietly surveying the United States’ progressive past, points most perceptively to the struggle that has faced the American Left since long before 2020. A history of violence and oppression told entirely through the sites and historical markers that stand in tribute to America’s fallen and forgotten revolutionaries, John Gianvito’s Profit motive and the whispering wind reiterates a hard truth about our world: that socially inclined thought is rarely embraced, and that the minds and voices of those fighting for real change are often only appreciated by an engaged few in the rear-view mirror. To the latter point, Profit Read more →

The idea of a festival as a firewall seems to be stating the obvious, but 2020 has answered the question: what if you throw a film festival and nobody shows up? Read more →

By Devika Girish The films of Nicolás Zukerfeld pit images against words, staging wily games of onscreen meaning-making. Literary miscellanea often spur the ambulatory narratives of the Argentine director’s works: a mysterious letter opens into two Rashomon-esque views of a street encounter in the short La distancia entre las cosas (2008); annotated articles and battered books punctuate the post-breakup meanderings of the characters in the feature-length Winter Comes After Autumn (2016), co-directed by Zukerfeld and his frequent collaborator Malena Solarz; and a page number scribbled on a photocopy brings together a community of cinephiles in the duo’s short, Let Us Now Praise Movies (2017). At a certain point in each film, these incidental connections turn into contests: a voice reads or narrates text over tenuously Read more →

By Jonathan Rosenbaum Teaching an online course on Agnès Varda at the School of the Art Institute this fall for 39 students has put me in regular touch with Criterion’s superb 15-disc Blu-ray box set The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, every week. The packaging reminds me in some ways of the handsome 78 rpm albums I used to cherish as objects and totems in the mid- to late ’40s, when I was still a toddler, although Criterion’s version of this sort of assembly, held in a box, manages to be neater and more compact. There’s also a richly illustrated and annotated 200-page book inside the box, with essays by Amy Taubin, Ginette Vincendeau, So Mayer, Alexandra Hidalgo, and Rebecca Bengal, and excellent “program notes” Read more →

By Chuck Stephens When I was young, people spoke of immorality.All the things they said were wrong are what I want to be.Over, under, sideways, down, (Hey!) I bounce a ball that’s square and round.When will it end? —The Yardbirds, 1966 Scrutable curio and irresistible objet, Michael Snow’s 1975 “artist’s book” Cover to Cover—a conceptual photo-roman slash slow-motion flipbook with a fabulous Möbius-twist partway through—has been at last rescued from pricey, collector’s-only rarefication: reified and republished in an affordably priced new edition of only 2,500 copies, just in time for Christmas, by those merry stocking-stuffers at Light Industry and Primary Information. Oh, what a lovely thing! Clever and curious, compelling and baffling, both highbrow tease and hippie noodle, Cover to Cover is packed as thick as Read more →

By Robert Koehler A passage in Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland describes the unlikely birth and hard death of the life of Empire, a mining town in northwest Nevada. “In 1923,” Bruder writes, “laborers established a tent colony on the site of what later became the town. By some accounts, Empire boasted the longest continuously operating mine in the country, excavating a claim first established by Pacific Portland Cement Company in 1910. On December 2, 2010, that history came to a sudden stop. Workers in steel-toed shoes and hard hats gathered in the community hall at 7:30 am for a mandatory meeting. Mike Spihlman, the gypsum plant’s soft-spoken manager, delivered a grim edict to a room full of stunned faces: Empire was shutting down. Everyone had Read more →

By Darren Hughes In his 1892 inaugural address, governor William MacCorkle warned that in the coming years West Virginia would find itself occupying the same “position of vassalage” that Ireland held in relation to England, and for similar reasons: “But the men who today are purchasing the immense areas of the most valuable lands in the State, are not citizens and have only purchased in order that they may carry to their distant homes in the North, the usufruct of the lands of West Virginia, thus depleting the State of its wealth to build grandeur and splendor in other States.” Over the previous century, the Scots-Irish smallholders of Appalachia—a region that stretches more than 2,000 miles from western New York to northern Alabama—had been systematically Read more →