Table of contents for Issue 71 - Summer 2017 in Cinema Scope

In Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply (2016), Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) walks by the water at 3:00 a.m. to talk business with Howard Hughes (Beatty), who’s taken on the ambitious young real-estate speculator as a driver in his West Coast operation. After strolling the length of the pier, the pair winds up at a picnic table that’s been set up with a wee-hours buffet: cheeseburgers a la carte. (Hughes’ hunger is a running joke in Rules Don’t Apply: it’s a good bet that no other film in history contains as many references to banana-nut ice cream, the procurement of which becomes one of many crucial plot points in Beatty’s overstuffed yet still elegantly structured screenplay.) This sequence strongly suggests that Beatty read Joan Didion’s assessment of the Hughes mythos in…

“Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture,” said Amílcar Cabral in 1970. The founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Cabral located the structure and maintenance of colonial domination within the realm of culture as much as those of the political and economic, and thus placed a complementary importance on cultural production in any act of revolution. Identifying media, and film in particular, as a vital contribution to the liberation struggle, in 1967 Cabral arranged for the enrollment of four young revolutionaries—José Bolama Cobumba, Josefina Crato, Flora Gomes, and Sana na N’Hada—in the Cuban Film Institute to train under the tutelage of Santiago Álvarez. In…

In 1978, a fire at George Eastman House (now the Eastman Museum) destroyed four buildings, along with a substantial portion of the archive’s film collection (327 titles, as reported by The New York Times). All that remained were the ashes of celluloid fragments and charred metal reels, which to this day lay buried beneath a greenhouse in the Museum’s north garden. The source of the blaze, as noted in the fire department’s report: “spontaneous combustion” of nitrate film. The most common carrier of 35mm film before the widespread introduction of “safety film” for theatrical exhibition in 1951, nitrocellulose was capable of self-igniting when stored under adverse conditions (namely heat), and the volatility of the material resulted in several tragedies throughout the first half of the 20th century and beyond. In…

With its wonderful Whitman-inspired title, On the Beach at Night Alone gave us one of the year’s most indelible images, so crushing, mournful, and beautiful in its abandon: Kim Minhee’s character Younghee lying forlorn in the sand on a cold beach. The solemn distress and physical destitution occasioned by Liebeskummer was palpable in her dignified collapse. Jean Grémillon’s masterpiece Remorques (1941) came quickly to mind, with Michele Morgan elegantly splayed and emotionally distraught on a craggy beach in Brittany, tempered melodrama seeping into the sand as the complexities of an affair intensified gravity’s weight. More than any other of Hong Sangsoo’s female protagonists, Minhee quite literally embodies “the woman on the beach,” to reference another of the filmmaker’s titles in an oeuvre whose variations on a self-reflexive theme have increasingly…

The first segment of Abbas Kiarostami’s final, posthumously completed video piece, 24 Frames, is a simple rendering of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 painting The Hunters in the Snow. Staring, for a Cageian four-and-a-half minutes, at the familiar wintery scene—its composition exemplary of the Dutch master’s decentred, multitiered narrative designs—we witness Kiarostami’s methodical application of various animated motion effects: snow begins to fall, crows swoop across the frame, smoke billows from a chimney, and a dog pisses on a tree. It’s cute and clever, effortlessly watchable, more than a bit kitschy, and somewhat calming (even as it evokes Lars von Trier’s not dissimilar, yet exceptionally more ominous appropriation of the same painting in Melancholia [2011]). This is the only one of the film’s two dozen “frames” to not be based…

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words…To speak amorously is to expend without an end in sight, without a crisis; it is to practice a relation without orgasm.” —Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments Opening with a sex scene wherein both partners fail to achieve climax, Un beau soleil intérieur is arguably Claire Denis’ least characteristic film to date. Apart from its atypical loquacity and humour, if there’s a fundamental aspect that renders this comedy of manners an anomaly amongst its author’s narrative features, it’s precisely a lack of orgasm. Denis has always practiced a cinema of ecstasy; her films are propelled by restless and swelling sensuous movements…

“Some are born to fail,” says Strother Martin’s cutman to tight-lipped street fighter Chaney (Charles Bronson) in Walter Hill’s Hard Times (1975); “others have it thrust upon them.” For the unlucky others who happen to be on the receiving end of Chaney’s hands of stone, failure is indeed something that is thrust upon them; the palookas in John Huston’s Fat City (1972), on the other hand, belong to that first breed, those for whom failure is their natural state. At a time when the moribund boxing world seems to be on a bit of an uptick—with the recent heavyweight thriller between Anthony Joshua and Wladimir Klitschko and the forthcoming, much-anticipated bout between middleweight superstars Canelo Álvarez and Gennady Golovkin—the return of Huston and Hill’s fight flicks on Blu-ray (in definitive,…

“An avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way that ‘image’ is presented. The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed reality that is represented. Consequently a continual attempt to destroy the illusion is necessary.”— Theory and Definition of Structural/ Materialist Film, Peter Gidal, 1989 What follows—purposefully, impatiently, and entirely against the grain of the historically entrenched Structural/Materialist film-theoretical enterprise—is an adjectively enhanced and thoroughly bourgeois taxonomy of the undestroyed materiality remaining in Peter Gidal’s Room (Double Take) (1967), adumbrated accordingly. The imbrication of “articulation” that surrounds this specifically England-oriented…

“Why are Luke Fowler’s films so hard to get a grip on?” That’s the question that critic/Berlinale programmer James Lattimer posed regarding the Scottish artist and filmmaker last year in a piece for MUBI’s Notebook. While Lattimer concludes that Fowler’s unique style results in “loose, deliberately fuzzy essays” that give the viewer an unusual amount of freedom, taken as a body of work there are certain fundamental gestures and preoccupations. His choice of subjects, for one thing, tells us a great deal about how he thinks about historiography and cinema’s place within it. Modern history, like cinema, exists in a well-worn dominant mode, an edifice with its load-bearing pillars— Marx and Freud, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, stolid Englishmen and American renegades. Needless to say, Fowler isn’t interested in this cozy, self-perpetuating…

To celebrate its 70th anniversary, Cannes aggressively, yet clumsily, inserted itself into all kinds of contemporary debates over that ageold question: What is Cinema? The first answer to this question: the cinema is Cannes. On the organizational side, this was evident in the reworking of the festival trailer that runs prior to each official screening, which (to the usual strains of “Aquarium” from Saint-Saëns’ Le carnaval des animaux) added a list of knighted filmmakers to the red velvet steps that changed daily and progressed roughly forwards through history. In effect, this gambit set out to establish a canon of the most important filmmakers at work since the existence of the festival, from Orson Welles to, uh, Michel Franco. (I left before the final iteration; that’s an educated guess.) That these…

Documentary films have always been something of an afterthought at Cannes. While the contours of nonfiction, thanks to the efforts of festivals such as Doclisboa, CPH:DOX, True/False, and Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real, have been expanded and enriched in recent years, Cannes continues to adhere to its own hopelessly conventional criteria for selecting documentaries out of competition in the Official Selection—whether they turn out to be exceptional, mediocre, or execrable. For example, in 2017, Cannes’ documentary roster included films directed by celebrities (Vanessa Redgrave), anointed auteurs (Claude Lanzmann, Raymond Depardon, Agnes Varda), and the odd Sundance favourite (Eugene Jarecki). To start at the bottom of the barrel, Redgrave’s Sea Sorrow, a film that would never have been screened if the director happened to be named Valerie Pinkgrave, is an…

“Look at me, and tell me if you’ve known me before.” That question, voiced by Laura Dern’s Nikki Grace in David Lynch’s most recent (and perhaps last) feature film Inland Empire (2006), hovers continually over Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch and Mark Frost’s long-awaited third installment of their pathbreaking TV series. In the opening moments of the new series, the first two episodes of which screened at Cannes, images from the second season’s finale—which saw Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Dale Cooper trapped in the labyrinth of the other-dimensional Black Lodge, where he stumbles upon the Red Room that had first appeared in his prophetic dream in Season One—play out once again, followed by a presentday scene in that same iconic space. While many of the sights are familiar from the original…

So, who is this Baby Driver? Listen to Doc (Kevin Spacey, fusing Francis Underwood ruthlessness and Keyser Söze legerdemain), who employs the cherubic-looking kid as his exclusive getaway man on various heists: “He’s a good kid and a devil behind the wheel.” Doc has the kid on the hook, since Baby—not his real name, it turns out—inadvertently nabbed a stash of Doc’s money when he was a teen; with each job, he pays off a little of his debt. But Baby (an alternately engaging and chilly Ansel Elgort) isn’t so innocent as to assume that any debt to a heist maestro like Doc, the kind of crook who wears suits and doesn’t gets his hands dirty, is ever fully paid off. Add to that, Doc is probably a substitute parent…

An epistolic ode to labour, love, and life on the road, Affonso Uchôa and Joao Dumans’ Araby opens with a seemingly innocuous sequence that belies its ambition: teenage Andre (Murilo Caliari) pedalling his bike on a mountain road in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a Townes Van Zandt song on the soundtrack presaging wistful sentiment. The way that Andre will become both subordinate and critical to the film’s primary narrative— which uses the life story of wandering labourer Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa) to relate a whole history of the Brazilian body and soul in servitude—is indicative of the film’s expansive perspective. It’s not incidental that Andre and the other kids who populate the first reel of Araby are bored, sick, faithless, and absent parents; in the morning there’s…

“À quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve Jamais, jamais!” —Charles Baudelaire On a clear day in the spring of this year, having fallen under the geometric spell of an exhibition of new work by the photographer Sara Cwynar, a young woman found herself on the wrong uptown train and was left to troop some number of blocks on foot in less time than she might have preferred. She arrived at the theatre in quite a state and, lulled, one imagines, by its robust air conditioning, slept through what she had come for: a lecture entitled Doppelgänger, presented by the artist and filmmaker Basma Alsharif as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual Art of the Real festival. This young woman, a stranger slouched half a dozen…

Two years before Roberto Rossellini started shooting Rome, Open City on January 18, 1945, the famed Italian director had just completed another war trilogy. Inaugurated with the 1941 navy flick The White Ship, followed a year later by A Pilot Returns, and crowned in 1943 with Man of the Cross, the trilogy celebrated the Italian army’s questionable exploits in the war fought on the side of Nazi Germany. Awarded the National Fascist Party Award at the ninth edition of the Venice Film Festival where the film premiered, The White Ship extolled the virtues of the Italian navy and its fearless German ally while depicting the English as little more than barbaric cowards. Based on a story by Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio and produced by the company he presided over, the…

A secular credo patchworked from the Golden Rule and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is engraved on an altar: “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.” Before it was a two-hour and 20-minute Palme d’Or winner, The Square was born as this hackneyed art installation by Ruben Östlund and his producer, Kalle Boman. First appearing at Vandelorum Museum for Art and Design in Varnamo, Sweden, a second Square was later constructed in Grimstad, Norway, with another expected to be paved in Vestfossen before the end of 2017. Östlund and Boman state in the film’s press kit that the project has “the ability to improve people’s attitude towards strangers and could potentially have a positive impact on the ‘bystander…

With Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless and Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature premiering in Competition, Cannes was overburdened with portentous Russian-language films. It was thus all the more impressive that Closeness, Kantemir Balagov’s debut in Un Certain Regard, so stood out in approach and freshness. With this expertly wrought, unexpectedly dense drama of a tiny Jewish community in Nalchik, a predominantly Muslim city near the Georgian border, the 26-year-old director crafted Cannes’ only major discovery. Balagov is himself from Nalchik, having attended the film program at the Kabardino-Balkar State University started by the greatest working Russian director, Aleksandr Sokurov, and intended to foster new film culture in a city bereft of it. Made without state support and instead financed independently by Sokurov’s nonprofit, An Example of Intonation, Closeness conflates the authentic and…

It’s too easy to criticize or praise a movie by seizing on an individual scene, frame, line of dialogue, still, or edit and deploying it to stand in for (if not iconize) the whole. But by and large, that’s how recall works, and there’s a moment in Citizenfour (2014)— Laura Poitras’ primary-source documentary that accompanies Edward Snowden in the days prior to his release of classified information about the National Security Agency’s massive, unconstitutional domestic spying program—that has haunted my memory of the film in perpetuity. By this point, Snowden is a few days into his series of interviews with Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald, and the incessant conversation— jargon-laden, awkward, fluttering— has come to a lull. Within hours of the publication of his first disclosure, Snowden looks out the…

“Does this film resemble Juliane? Do we resemble each other?” asks Sofia Bohdanowicz in the final moments of her beguiling Maison du bonheur, reflecting with a mix of anxiety and curiosity on the film’s capacity to serve as a small monument to its subject. Bohdanowicz’s earlier shorts and feature- length experimental docudrama Never Eat Alone (2016) have thoroughly traced her own family history—examining the lives, loves, and little-known creative ventures of her maternal and paternal grandmothers— while simultaneously exploring nonfiction filmmaking’s potential to tackle generational inheritances through the work of archiving the objects and texts that remain from the past. Though it marks another look at the artful way an older woman arranges the everyday structure as well as the ephem era of her life, Maison du Bonheur—a fleet, hour-long…