Table of contents for Issue 72 - Fall 2017 in Cinema Scope

Over the course of two months in 1988, a 28-year-old Pierre Léon completed his debut feature, Deux dames sérieuses, adapted from Jane Bowles’ only novel (Tennessee Williams’ favourite, no less). This would seem to have been an impossible task, given the dense modernist source, Léon total’s lack of experience, and no budget to speak of. Taking his cues from Werner Schroeter’s Weiße Reise (1979), Léon already knew that cinema was capable of mapping and tracing the most incredible journeys with minimum expenditures. An entire world was contained in one room, with Renaud Legrand’s paint job constituting all of the production’s set design. The cast was comprised of Léon’s friends and family, as well as a group of filmmakers and colleagues from Libération, where he worked back then as a classical-music…

“[Cinemas of the senses] generate worlds of mutating sounds and images that often ebb and flow between the figurative and the abstract, and where the human form, at least as a unified entity, easily loses its function as the main point of reference. One way or another, the cinema of sensation is always drawn towards the formless: where background and foreground merge and the subjective body appears to melt into matter.” —Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation Writing in 2007 on sense and the aesthetics of transgression in the socalled New French Extremity, Martine Beugnet laid out how a cinema of sensation—that is, one that privileges filmic texture, affect, and embodiment over and above narrative—could speak to a nation’s specific questions of identity and difference. “Film is, by definition, the medium…

Columbus, Ohio-based artists Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter Rose. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Leventhal’s video work (written about with customary perspicacity by Chris Stults in Cinema Scope 47) and Wilson’s multimedia performance and installation work (discussed in some detail in an interview with Leeza Meksin: temporaryartreview.com /the-invisible-inside-the-visible-a-conversation- with-sheilah-wilson) could exactly prepare us for the force of the women’s collaborative efforts. Although their joint body of work includes a performance based on the reading of love letters, Shameless Light (2016), and a new video installation, A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) (2017), created for the Columbus Museum of Art, the major…

On September 23, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos plunged the Philippines into a period of martial law that would last nearly a decade. Characterized by economic stagnation and rampant human rights abuses, the years that followed—during which Marcos consolidated his brutal kleptocracy—saw massive infrastructure developments in the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Complex, a vast area of prime, reclaimed land along the edge of Manila Bay. The ongoing construction on this site (including the famously disastrous Manila Film Center) was but one facet of First Lady Imelda Marcos’ extravagant “beautification projects,” which were ostensibly intended to attract foreign investment, improve tourism, and signal the nation’s supposed economic health. In practice, this meant the eradication of Manila’s overcrowded slums via mass evictions and “temporary” relocations (a practice that would continue even…

Throughout his artistic militancy, Travis Wilkerson has rooted his praxis in a confrontational understanding of American history and, most crucially, in the reactivation of its repressed radical passages. From the margins of the film industry, Wilkerson has frontally challenged its dominant procedures and manifestations. In his pamphlet-like films, political invectives of remarkable aesthetic integrity, theory, and practice are assigned the same emotional space; images are never corollary nor ornamental in relation to the narrative. Emblematic in this regard is his short National Archive (2001), possibly the only American film ever shot from the point of view of imperialism: the cockpit of a jet fighter. Wilkerson is an anomalous presence in “US indie cinema,” and his radical yearning possesses the urgent feeling of necessity. Wilkerson has brought to the surface of…

“Once I spent a dark afternoon in a sleazy Manhattan cafeteria, drowning (or amplifying) my sorrows in black coffees. After this grim affair, I trudged out onto the street only to be met by a wild-eyed disheveled character yelling at everyone who was crossing the street towards him. As I got close enough, I could hear what he was saying. He would point at passers-by, staring them in the eye, and yell, ‘Yes, but do you know what you really look like?’”—Bill Viola, Sight Unseen: Enlightened Squirrels and Fatal Experiments, 1982, revised 1998 Has onetime trailblazing “video artist” of the ’70/’80s and now Major International Museum-Ready Installation Master Bill Viola lapsed permanently from the former into the latter in the cultural memories and current reckonings of cinephiles presently at play?…

William K.L. Dickson’s Sandow (1894) is a three-part documentary study of the Prussian muscleman Friedrich Wilhelm Muller, who adopted the more flamboyant nom de plume after he dodged the draft and joined the circus. Sandow’s placement on undergraduate film studies curriculums the world over owes to its unique historical value: it was the first commercially exhibited kinetoscope. The Sandow shorts are also mesmerizing on their own terms, however. Film historian Charles Musser identifies Dickson’s rapt, focused images of his subjects running through poses as a fleshy predecessor to the so-called “cinema of attractions,” and the parallel between Muller’s fine-tuned physiognomy and the device recording it is suggestive: the strongman and the medium are both flexing their muscles. All of which is to say that Denis Côté’s latest work, which vividly…

An old face—skin drawn tautly over jaw and cheekbone, thinning grey hair, eyeballs quivering like tadpoles—is the central image in Wang Bing’s Golden Leopard winner Mrs. Fang. The naked, sober image of this face, which belongs to Fang Xiuying, the film’s bedridden 68-year-old protagonist, is studied at length and in close-up; the camera’s prominence imbues Fang’s pallid features with a kind of unclouded solemnity. The abstract concepts of death and illness are summoned to reality here, glimpsed in the twitch of an eyelid or in the grimace on Fang’s petrified lips. Before the full subject of the film—the bare intimacy of approaching the death of another human—is revealed, we see the grandmother in a few brief glimpses around her home in her village of Maihui, in China’s Zhejiang province. Wang…

Early this year, a cross-cultural consensus emerged about what might at first seem a fairly oddball subject: the aesthetics of alt-right cinema. Film Comment was the first to enter into the discussion with Jeff Reichert’s article on the films of Steve Bannon in the January/February 2017 issue. It was one of those classic Film Comment pieces: a comprehensive career survey, heavy on the formal analysis with some industry background, biographical material, and socio-political analysis. As befits the subject, the last element was more prominent than usual. In the May 1, 2017 issue, The New Yorker ran Connie Bruck’s feature-length piece about Bannon’s years in cinema, titled “How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon.” This was equally true-to-form, inasmuch as it interviewed scads of Hollywood insiders to figure out what kind of influence…

When the eighth part of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return begins, one doesn’t yet know that the episode will take the form of (visual) music. Though it starts straightforwardly enough, Part Eight soon reveals itself to be likely the most formally radical episode of American television ever made, and perhaps the most experimental piece of television tout court. By the end of its original airing on June 25, 2017, Lynch and Frost had liquidated any claims for the experimentation and provocation of “prestige television” as it existed prior, and they had done so before a rapt, global audience. (While audience numbers are largely untrackable in the streaming age, Twitter trends are enlightening.) As well, the episode had made the original Twin Peaks’ dismantling of televisual structures…

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is a bundle of contradictions: strident but unsure of itself, overstated in its understatedness, a mood piece that suffers from tonal incoherence, a “universal” take on gender dynamics unable to see beyond its own highly circumscribed point of view. Following Don Siegel’s 1971 film of the same name (which was likewise adapted from Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel A Painted Devil), Coppola’s Beguiled focuses on wounded Union soldier John McBurney (Colin Farrell) as he recuperates at a samesex seminary in Confederate-held Virginia, his presence inspiring a mix of confusion, fear, and desire in headmistress Martha (Nicole Kidman), teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), and student Alicia (Elle Fanning). Needless to say, the scenario offers some fertile psychosexual terrain: institutionalized 19th-century sexual repression being tenuously maintained during the unrestrained license…

“Now I am in front of a rock. It splits. No, it is no longer split. It is as before. Again it is split in two. No, it is not split at all. It splits once more. Once more no longer split, and this goes on indefinitely. Rock intact, then split, then rock intact, then split, then rock intact, then split, then rock intact…” —Henri Michaux “Forms, ideas, and sensations intertwine as though they were a single, dizzyingly proliferating entity.” These words on Henri Michaux, from Octavio Paz’s introduction to Miserable Miracle, the “exploration” of mescaline from which Ben Russell has borrowed the above as the epigraph to his mining film Good Luck, might well have been written about the body of work Russell has produced over the last two…

Narimane Mari’s 2013 film Bloody Beans concludes with a query: “What is worth more, to be or to obey?” These words, invoked in succession by a handful of the film’s adolescent protagonists, are taken from Antonin Artaud’s “Petit poeme des poissons de la mer,” an allegorical 1926 text by the French dramatist in which a school of fish refuse to submit to the question’s nested dialectic and are summarily killed for their defiance. Though Mari never reveals the fate of her film’s children, a ragtag group of boys and girls who for the majority of the movie’s runtime are seen ecstatically re-enacting instances of wartime violence and colonial aggression in a nocturnal flight through the villages and cemeteries of coastal Algiers, the rhetorical repercussions of Artaud’s parable nonetheless seem to…

If it is not here It must be there For somewhere and nowhere Parallels In versions of each other .... where Or even before something came to be —Sun Ra, “Parallels” (1970) Described as “A Video Film on Space and the Music of the Omniverse,” Ephraim Asili’s Points on a Space Age (2009) is an appropriately freeform documentary about musician and poet Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Deriving its title (as well as the text for its intertitles and chapter headings) from Sun Ra’s poetry and writing collection The Immeasurable Equation, Asili’s film mingles video footage of the contemporary Arkestra (helmed by Marshall Allen since Sun Ra’s death in 1993) with video interviews about Sun Ra, the cosmic potential of jazz and music more generally, and archival sources, most prominently…

I have a theory that there are so many films that haven’t been done, that have been done a hundred times, but haven’t been done yet.” — George A. Romero in 1973 Remembering George A. Romero, I don’t think of zombies. I think of humans. Consider, for instance, a seemingly insignificant yet memorable scene near the end of Monkey Shines (1988), one of the director’s finest films. The protagonist—for in Romero’s ambiguous universe there are neither heroes nor anti-heroes, just humans trying, and often failing, to rise to the threatening occasion—is trapped in a desperate situation. Bearing the characteristically allegorical name Allan Mann (“a man”), he has contributed to bringing on the disaster himself, although his awareness of his agency in the proceedings is limited at best, another typical Romero…

Laurel Fantauzzo’s singular and quite lovely book is an inquiry into the murders of two young film critics, the Slovenian Nika Bohinc, aged 29, and the Canadian-Filipino Alexis Tioseco, aged 28. (Tioseco was born in Manila but raised and schooled in Vancouver from 1983, when he was two. His father was Filipino, his mother Italian-Chilean.) Both were shot on the night of September 1, 2009 as they tried to resist an apparent domestic robbery in Tioseco’s home in Quezon City, Metro Manila. Fantauzzo never met either victim, so her investigation is entirely retrospective, and she’s not a film specialist, so she can’t fully get behind the film-criticism battles that both writers were fighting. (A film-literate proofreader would have caught the scattering of small errors; there’s no French New Wave film…

As lowlifes Peter and Joey pack into a crumbling sedan with “My Nova Scotia Home” haphazardly painted on the passenger side door, children look on in envy and the elderly with wistful hope, all recognizing the longstanding rural myth that life must be better elsewhere. For Cape Breton Island, some 350 kilometres away from the provincial and economic capital of Halifax, this opening montage from Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970) is the most important scene our national canon has to offer: overgrown train tracks, abandoned barns, and out-ofcommission mills and factories. After decades of extracting and burning coal, the last mine in Cape Breton closed down in 2001, and the island began its rough transition into a post-industrial economy. With just under 100,000 people left in the region,…

Let’s start with this: the transitions in Fred Wiseman’s new film (and there are many) have a simple and specific beauty. They double as establishing shots, each comprising a brief cluster of New York street views, usually including an intersection sign to pin us to one of the 88 branches in the world’s biggest city-library network, and also as a kind of rest, a bridging and a breathing point. These shots rarely last for more than a few seconds—you rarely hear much about Wiseman’s brevity, but he’s actually about as succinct a filmmaker as you will find, if you’re really paying attention. As illustration: to coax us in to the three-hour-and-17 minute Ex Libris, Wiseman hits us with the title card, a shot of the sign bearing the words “New…