Issue 97 - Winter 2024

Cinema Scope

Expanding the Frame on International Cinema

Cinema Scope1 min read
Cinema Scope
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Mark Peranson ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN Vanesa Mazza ASSISTANT EDITOR Peter Mersereau CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Tom Charity, Christoph Huber, Dennis Lim, Adam Nayman PRODUCTION AND MARKETING MANAGER Kayleigh Rosien WEB DESIGN Adrian Ki
Cinema Scope3 min read
Editor’s Note
I feel like I’ve explained enough in this space over the last year, so that announcing this is the final issue of Cinema Scope is in no way surprising. But let me reiterate that the time has long passed to envision a way of making this magazine susta
Cinema Scope18 min read
Last Of The Independents
Don Siegel’s superior crime picture Charley Varrick (1973) was supposed to be called Last of the Independents, but that title was nixed by Universal honcho Lew Wasserman. This probably gives even more credence to the subversive, stick-it-to-the-syste
Cinema Scope7 min read
Deep Cuts
Lately it feels like everywhere I look obscure old films are being dusted off and presented to eager publics. Even a right-wing newspaper like London’s Telegraph had cause last November to speak of a “repertory boom” in the city where I live, deeming
Cinema Scope18 min read
Your Own Hall of Fame
Two movies, both alike in indignity, in the ’90s, where we lay our scene. Because neither Videoheaven nor Pavements—both putatively non-fictional pop-culture essay films written and directed by Alex Ross Perry—have officially been released, programme
Cinema Scope15 min read
Open Source
It requires relatively little mental strain to imagine a world in which all that can be photographed has been; it requires, I think, considerably more to imagine one in which every possible photograph has been made. I find that both of these little t
Cinema Scope15 min read
Objects of Desire
“The problem is that it then goes off on tangents and the plot becomes secondary.”—A Mysterious World Until recently a somewhat forgotten figure of the New Argentine Cinema, director Rodrigo Moreno has, with The Delinquents, asserted himself as perha
Cinema Scope27 min read
From The Vision To The Nail In The Coffin, And The Resurrection
A teenaged girl is texting her boyfriend from her bedroom, seeking compassion: “I’m just in a really bad place right now.” The boy responds: “Oh, what are you doing in Germany?” Many can relate to this fierce meme which appeared on social media follo
Cinema Scope37 min read
Film Tourists in Los Angeles
This essay is a chapter from my forthcoming book, which I have called “a continuation by other means of my 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, a book about how movies have represented and misrepresented the city of Los Angeles.” It was written
Cinema Scope10 min read
Out of Time
In her 2023 book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell writes that “at its most useful…leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it.” The passage is evocative not only for the way in
Cinema Scope9 min read
The Sense Of The Past
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world o
Cinema Scope6 min read
The World in Focus
While I would never compare the end of a magazine’s run with the end of a person’s life, there is a painful appropriateness to the fact that I am eulogizing my friend, filmmaker Vincent Grenier, in the final issue of Cinema Scope. Grenier’s work repr
Cinema Scope8 min read
Now or Never
In what will likely be my last column in these pages, I’ve mainly tried to highlight releases and films that I’ve been meaning yet failing to watch for ages, following the assumption that it’s now or never. As most of my examples make clear, this avo
Cinema Scope8 min read
Dead Slow Ahead
In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that mechanized war, industrialization, and urbanization were reorganizing human existence on a mass scale and were, in turn, making “experience” increasingly incommunicable. The storyteller, one
Cinema Scope5 min read
The Killer
Clocking in at a clean 47 seconds, the title sequence in The Killer sets something like a metronome for David Fincher’s latest effort. Guided by the steady pulse of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, a montage unfolds on details of the eponymous,
Cinema Scope5 min read
Killers Of The Flower Moon
Despite what you may have heard from some breathless movie critics, 2023 was a year of further decline for American cinema. But there was a promising inflection point: the year marked a moment when the seemingly unstoppable empire of Marvel began its
Cinema Scope5 min read
Menus-plaisirs – Les Troisgros
At a recent NYFF talk on the trustworthiness of the documentary image, Frederick Wiseman quipped that back in 1968, having immersed himself in a prison for the criminally insane for his first film, Titicut Follies (1967), the logical milieu for a fol
Cinema Scope5 min read
Poor Things
With her 1818 novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley not only authored a story that passed into myth, but also invented a new type of monster that exists independent of that story. It is the Monster—and a familiar but shifting se
Cinema Scope6 min read
The Practice
The latest film by Martin Rejtman reaffirms his singular place in Argentine and world cinema as one of the rare non-mainstream auteurs working today, with brio and invention, in the realm of comedy. Beginning with Rapado (1992), each of Rejtman’s fic
Cinema Scope5 min read
Priscilla
The aesthetic appeal of Sofia Coppola’s work—baby pink and pastel colours, girly make-up and cute clothes, soft lighting and trippy music—belies a deeper understanding of the condition of teenage girls, her favourite subject. For the filmmaker, these
Cinema Scope3 min read
Pale Shibboleth
“There is a metaphor recurrent in contemporary discourse on the nature of consciousness: that of cinema. And there are cinematic works which present themselves as analogues of consciousness in its constitutive and reflexive modes, as though inquiry i
Cinema Scope9 min read
Face the Music
Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s sublime eco-fable, Evil Does Not Exist, begins and ends with the plangent score by Ishibashi Eiko, played fortissimo over an extended tracking shot facing skywards. A forest canopy, stark and stripped of its foliage by winter’s sp

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