Cinema Scope. 33.

Flanked by the usual must-know-about interviews, features, columns and reviews, the centerpiece of the new issue of Cinema Scope is a collection of "Fall Festival Highlights," and we might as well begin with Andrew Tracy's Web-only prescription for maintaining some sense of equilibrium at the Toronto International Film Festival: "As the inescapable pressures of festival-going naturally produce soaring overpraise and cataclysmic denunciation in abundance, the key is to find moments of sanctuary, pockets of restfulness where films can find some breathing space to turn over in the mind - and hopefully, some films that adopt that relaxed tempo as well, in contrast to the hard-sell products that dominate so many festival reports." First film up is Michelange Quay's "leisurely, Denis-inflected meditation Eat, for This Is My Body," and Adam Nayman talks with Quay in this issue as well.

Tracy also discusses Béla Tarr's The Man from London, Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest, "one of the most exhilarating and frustrating films of (this miniscule cross-section of) the festival," Takeshi Kitano's Glory to the Filmmaker!, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Ploy, Vincenzo Marra's L'Ora di punta, Celine Sciamma's "fine debut," Naissance des pieuvres, and Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra, "one of his most (seemingly) unassuming and affecting efforts."

"Startling physical juxtapositions abound in The Axe in the Attic, the new documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, contributing to what is one of the most challenging and unsettling American films of the year," writes Livia Bloom.

"[W]hat's most remarkable about Chop Shop is not its intelligence or humanity, or [Ramin] Bahrani's increasing fluency with the cinematic language he learned from the gods of neo-realism (Italians and Iranians in particular)," writes Jason Anderson. "It's how convincingly he fuses his characters with their environment. While it may seem strange to suggest that a movie set in New York could be another example of the renewed enthusiasm for a regionalist aesthetic in American indie circles, the Willet's Point of Chop Shop is every bit as distinctive, compelling and strange as the Cascade Mountains in Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy (2006), Memphis in Ira Sachs's Forty Shades of Blue (2005), England, Arkansas in Jeff Nichols's Shotgun Stories and the North Carolina towns in Phil Morrison's Junebug (2006) and David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000)."

Robert Koehler on Death in the Land of Encantos and, to a lesser extent, Philippine cinema in general: "Now that Raya Martin, John Torres, and the rest have come into their own—forming the most dynamic and daring national cinema anywhere - it's thrilling to see [Lav] Diaz graze deeper into his own Malay ecosystem, where viewer adaptation to local conditions is absolutely essential, where certain categories can be tossed out with the trash."

"Here's Deleuze on Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)," offers Jerry White: "'There is thus both a hallucinatory element, where the acting spirit raises itself to boundlessness in nature, and a hypnotic dimension where the spirit runs up against the limits which Nature opposes to it.' This is both preceded and followed by formulations of utterly stultifying density, which are, of course, Deleuze's stock in trade. Nevertheless, he's on to something here, and that something is visible even in so ostensibly conventional a work as Encounters at the End of the World. It would be easy to read this film as late, benign Herzog, a soft work from a mellowing figure, the New German Cinema made safe for American cablevision at last. I don't think so."

Serge Bozon's La France "contains the seeds not only of those troop war movies by Samuel Fuller, John Ford and Raoul Walsh, but also their commie counterparts such as Boris Barnet (as elucidated [in the interview that follows] by the critic-turned-director)," writes Mark Peranson. "La France isn't a pop movie per se, but a unique film where pop flits alongside a number of other discordant termites that likewise bore holes into the soul."

Michael Sicinski outlines a shift in experimental film and video from the days when "[m]odesty in aim, tenor, and execution was considered to be only good manners" to a present "willingness to engage in rather direct, even sweeping emotional effects":

Michael Robinson's work is at the heart of this new shift. In fact, the development of his film work could be seen as a response to this precise problem: How can experimental cinema retain its connection to history, remaining cognizant of the various crises of representation, without lapsing into nihilism? Or, for that matter, how is it possible to harness filmic effects in order to produce feelings of dread, longing, or even spontaneous release, without veering into ridiculousness or self-importance? How can we accept the failure (for now) of the grand designs of modernity and still operate on a plane of sincerity, commitment, and belief?

Then it's Andrew Tracy again, this time ruminating on the ways that "the digitalization of Our Hitler and Berlin Alexanderplatz does not dispel their monumental aura, but only increases it. Their accumulated cultural capital has received official validation by their transmutation into graspable, ownable object, their newly commodified incarnations gilded with the sanctifying language of holiness and canonicity. Heroically violating the norms of production, they have been welcomed back into the fold that has accommodated them, in one form or another, all along."

Jonathan Rosenbaum scours the globe again for hidden and not-so-hidden treasures on DVD. In this column, he opens with "two vivid memories illustrating the potential obtuseness of some Manhattan film reviewers," terrific and amusing tales of the initial reception of Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning and Pasolini's Teorema.

"The Zanzibar films are currently experiencing a second coming thanks in great part to Jackie Raynal (editor of La collectioneuse), who has financed a number of stunning new prints, and who aided Sally Shafto in her research for the recently published bilingual book, The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 put out by Paris Expérimental. The DVD label Re:Voir have done their bit, too, and many of the films, including Philippe Garrel's landmark passion plays, Le révélateur (1968) and Le lit de la vierge (1968) are now available on DVD, complete with a cheeky sticker warning the purchaser that 'Digital compression tarnishes one's taste for cinema.'" This is the occasion for Andréa Picard's piece, but you must read it for the background on the mid-60s revival of Mannerism that precedes it and the consideration of the films themselves that follows.

Canadian films of the 80s "created the backbone of an actual industry in a way that their predecessors simply never could," writes Steve Gravestock. "Yet running through many of them is a culture that's completely adrift, devoid of a common mythology or even recognizable shared motifs. In this respect, 2007 was a different kind of year."

"Yes, there will be blood, eventually, but it's more a biographical drama, a rags-to-riches story, and even a dynastic fable," writes Tom Charity. "[Paul Thomas] Anderson has said he was thinking of Dracula as he wrote Plainview, and we might discern shadows of other men: Jack McCann in Eureka (1984); McTeague from Greed (1924); maybe Michael Corleone and Noah Cross; the real (not Scorsese's) Howard Hughes; and certainly Charles Foster Kane. It's some measure of Anderson and [Daniel] Day-Lewis's great achievement that Plainview may be the most monstrous in this lofty company. Impressive and self-contained at first, he disintegrates before our eyes into a wretched, drooling grotesque, homicidal in his self-righteous self-hatred."

Jessica Winter's review of No Country for Old Men begins with a tale of one horrific (yet evidently unforgettable screening) and then: "A Coen movie is a hermetically sealed taxidermy shop of well-worn tales and genres; one can hardly imagine any of their cloned creatures escaping in search of a life of its own. Their hyper-referential pastiche style, at turns icy and strenuously madcap, has been showing signs of strains at least since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) - and so No Country for Old Men, in which they reach uncharacteristic depths of characterization and efface their natural attraction toward the glib and grotesque, is a revelation, and hopefully a turning point."

Posted by dwhudson at January 8, 2008 9:21 AM