This is the complete list of articles from the print magazine issue of Cinema Scope #64. 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. Interviews Infinite Worlds Possible: Hong Sangsoo on Right Now, Wrong Then Essay by…

By Chuck Stephens “In an early, 1960 survey of the then-nascent New American Cinema (NAC) movement, Jonas Mekas warned independent filmmakers of a regionally specific danger faced by artists working on the West Coast: ‘the shadow-killing and all leveling California sun.’…This early critique of Los Angeles cinema elucidates a distinctly heliophobic tendency structuring Mekas’ film…

By Samuel La France When it premiered in North American cinemas in 1961, Julian Roffman’s The Mask—released in the USA as Eyes of Hell, and returning to theatres this fall in a new digital restoration produced by TIFF and the 3-D Film Archive—was accompanied by a publicity campaign that touted the film’s cinematic “innovations” with…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum Practically speaking, we should invent our own extras, not necessarily or invariably depend on those that are made on our behalf. To cite four examples of what I mean: a) According to normal usage, Icarus Film’s DVD of Frédéric Choffat and Vincent Lowy’s 44-minute Marcel Ophüls and Jean-Luc Godard: The Meeting in…

By Leo Goldsmith Ben Rivers’ recent short, Things (2014), is an intimate tour of the filmmaker’s own domestic space and personal effects. Including photographs and movie stills, squirrels in the yard and trinkets on the shelves, beloved tomes ex libris Ben Rivers, and sound samples of Andy Kaufman and a National Geographic flexi-disc of a…

By Blake Williams As is true for many of the more interesting Italian filmmakers currently working outside of the country’s “thriving,” increasingly globalized film industry, Pietro Marcello’s films liberally fuse a range of vérité and metaphysical elements to contemplate the evanescence of pre-modernized and rural culture. Introspective, class-conscious, and sensitive to (art) history, Marcello can…

By Tom Charity “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” That, friends, is an opening sentence: J.G. Ballard at his best. And damn if Ben Wheatley doesn’t find just the…

Essay By Roger Koza Interview by Francisco Ferreira & Julien Gester Set in Suwon, about 30 kilometres south of Seoul, Hong Sangsoo’s Golden Leopard-winning masterpiece is divided into two sections which are almost exactly the same. Even the opening credits are repeated once the film reboots an hour in, though with one subtle yet noticeable…

By Phil Coldiron One of the enduring problems of the cinema is that André Bazin’s answer to the question, “What is it?” is so convincing that he was able to pass off an ontology of one of its modes, namely realism, as a sufficient description of the whole. Of course, the issue hardly begins with…

By Adam Nayman In the exciting climax of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp—the eight-part Netflix prequel to David Wain’s 2001 cult comedy about a Jewish summer camp circa 1981 infested with horny teenagers portrayed by paunchy grown-up comedians—the counsellors face down none other than Ronald Reagan (played by co-creator Michael Showalter). The…

By José Teodoro There is no such thing as ambient sunlight in Bleak Street. The sun’s rays descend from high above, diffused by a latticework of electrical cables, metal stairs, frayed tarpaulin, and urban flotsam, or slam down in hard sheets through a grid of tall buildings and concrete canopies. A swaying, phantom-like camera, deepening…

By Mark Peranson Let us pause a brief moment to consider and celebrate the career accomplishments of one Hong Sangsoo, on the long overdue occasion of his winning a main prize at a major international film festival. Is the Golden Leopard-winning Right Now, Wrong Then a masterpiece? The best film in the Locarno competition?  Is…

By Andréa Picard “It is in a house that one is alone. Not outside of it, but inside. In the park there are birds, cats. Maybe even a squirrel, a ferret. We are not alone in a park. But in the house, we are so alone that we are sometimes lost.”—Marguerite Duras, Écrire Writing about…

By Quintín The Club, the fourth feature by Pablo Larraín, is set in a small town in coastal Chile. There’s an unassuming house in this town that the Catholic Church runs as an open prison for priests who have committed serious crimes, sheltering them from the prying eyes of society. One priest (Father Vidal) is…