Issue 89 - Winter 2022

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
An editor’s note is a safe space that is wholly devoted to allowing me to write about that which I want, and I did consider coming up with some words on the most impressive moving-image event for me in 2021—which, of course, is Peter Jackson’s jaw-dr
Cinema Scope1 min read
Editor’s Note
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Mark Peranson ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN Vanesa Mazza MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Tracy CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman MARKETING COORDINATOR AND FINANCIAL MANAGER Jennifer Scott WEB DESIGN Adr
Cinema Scope15 min read
Show Biz Kids
Paul Thomas Anderson loves start-up entrepreneurs and fly-by-night schemes: you could run a straight line between There Will Be Blood’s (2007) oil magnate Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Punch-Drunk Love’s (2002) humble toilet-plunger impresa
Cinema Scope14 min read
Higher Power
The pear of anguish is a medieval torture instrument, whose spoon-like metal segments spread at the turn of a screw in its centre. Also known as the “choke pear” because it was often applied to the victim’s mouth, it could be inserted into any orific
Cinema Scope10 min read
Too Good at Goodbyes
Joanna Hogg chases authenticity. Her reluctance to call “Cut,” instead letting a scene’s action carry on via languid takes, static camerawork, and unscripted dialogue, reflects her intuitive sense of how small but telling slips within the typically d
Cinema Scope9 min read
The Flower and the Braided Rope
Formalist though I may be, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate any given film from its association with Netflix. This is especially the case during awards season, as Netflix is throwing away obscene amounts of money on tacky gift boxes f
Cinema Scope8 min read
The Other Half Is You
“If what I think is going to happen does happen, no one will send you the last film. You’ll have to come and get it,” declares Pedro (Will More) in the opening scene of Arrebato. Made during Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Franco,
Cinema Scope15 min read
What Lies Beyond
At once pre- and postmodern in its concerns, the cinema of Michelangelo Frammartino tranquilly traverses the tides of time. Over the course of 26 years, the Italian director has produced a small but mighty corpus of shorts, installations, and feature
Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Studies
A new four-year Honours Bachelor of Arts program Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga Delve into the history and theory of cinema and related moving image media at UTM. Developed by award-winning faculty, this new Major exp
Cinema Scope15 min read
Looking for Trouble
What you see is what you get. A man drifts around a small Dutch village, alone, video camera in hand, ringing random door bells. Whenever someone opens their door, he continues to film them in silence and with an apparently blank face, until somethin
Cinema Scope10 min read
In a Year of Six Kostrovs
In 2021, the world was introduced to Vadim Kostrov, a young Russian filmmaker with an entire body of work waiting in deep freeze. One film after another appeared in a matter of months, at such a pace that a proper collective accounting could be made.
Cinema Scope10 min read
Grace Notes and Ghosts
Since at least Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917), immigration has been one of American cinema’s great themes. The stories of the newly arrived have been related by a multitude of filmmakers, many of them émigrés themselves or the descendants of
Cinema Scope5 min read
Benediction
Artist biopics often entail a kind of contradiction. On the one hand, they study a historical individual, subject to the exigencies of the body and the contingencies of circumstance, while, on the other, they examine the subject’s art, which, qua art
Cinema Scope4 min read
Earwig
“You must teach her how to behave outside,” a distant voice drones over the phone to tight-lipped middle-aged patriarch Albert (Paul Hilton) early in Lucile Hadihalilovic’s Earwig. That aloof instruction, beamed into an otherwise oppressively silent
Cinema Scope4 min read
Espíritu Sagrado
Spanish cuisine has dazzled the world for years with its imaginative brio and technological expertise, a truly avant-garde approach to food that is capable of combining and finding harmony between the most extreme elements. But there also exists a lo
Cinema Scope5 min read
El Gran Movimiento
The tacit assumption of the “city symphony” is of a metropolis invariably harmonious, conducive to and cooperative with the machinations of both camera and director, the coalescence of an industrial apparatus. Kiro Russo’s native La Paz defies any su
Cinema Scope5 min read
A Night of Knowing Nothing
The sleep of reason produces monsters—or so said Francisco Goya, who used the phrase as the title of an aquatint published in 1799. The words appear as if etched into the side of a desk, atop of which a male figure slumps in slumber. From behind him,
Cinema Scope5 min read
Outside Noise
In 1984, the American philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto articulated a theory of the end of art. His claim—entirely distinct from declarations of the death of art—was not that art would no longer continue to be produced, but rather that there
Cinema Scope7 min read
The Space Between
“Beirut is a place where life is suspended,” declares one of the protagonists of Borhane Alaouié’s Beirut: The Encounter (1981), arguably the defining feature by the recently departed Lebanese filmmaker. This comment not only speaks to life in the di
Cinema Scope10 min read
The Gift of Charity
In the summer of 2017, the residents of Charity Crescent in Cathedraltown—an unincorporated town in the city of Markham, Ontario, just north of Toronto—were surprised by the arrival of a new monument to rival the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, whi
Cinema Scope13 min read
Musique Concrète
We begin in the air, a weightless gaze toward a mountained horizon. After some seconds, the camera descends, dropping beneath ground level, replacing the sky with a sheer face of pale earth. It settles, establishing a new ground. This movement is typ
Cinema Scope10 min read
Deliveries Of Smart Dialogue By Dieterle And Others
Apart from their impressive craft, the most striking common element I find in the early American talkies and ’40s fantasies by William Dieterle that I’ve seen is how literary they are. This adjective often has negative connotations in this North Amer
Cinema Scope6 min read
The Tragedy Of Macbeth
Why do Macbeth? As a dare, to confront the challenge of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays? To “beat it into submission,” as Sir Laurence Olivier once put it? To face and overcome the curse of “the Scottish Tragedy?” Kurosawa Akira came up w
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Worst Person In The World
Desire tends to figure as a destructive force in the work of Joachim Trier. Anders (Anders Danielson Lie), the protagonist of Oslo, August 31 (2011), is a recovering drug addict who, by the end of the film, slips back into his old ways after a day of
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Velvet Underground
Todd Haynes achieves an impressive array of objectives with his first bona-fide documentary in four decades of filmmaking. Among other things, The Velvet Underground functions very satisfactorily as an astute primer on the artistic and sociocultural
Cinema Scope5 min read
Cry Macho
At some point in the past five years, I detected a shift in how Clint Eastwood was being discussed by both mainstream critics and my curated Twitter/Letterboxd feeds. Well after the run of late-’90s/early-’00s potboilers (True Crime, 1999; Space Cowb
Cinema Scope3 min read
Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra
The secret title of this valediction is, “Watching a bootleg rip of a Blu-ray of Ken Jacobs’ 1963 Blonde Cobra with the subtitles on.” (The very prospect sounds like science fiction to these aging ears, yet here we are.) It’s a typically short scribb

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