Cinema Scope. 34.

Thanks to Michael Guillén for the heads-up: Cinema Scope and filmswelike are teaming up to offer free DVDs to subscribers, starting this summer. And the first DVD to come with that issue: Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth.

Meantime, online from the new issue are two pieces from each department; but first, editor's Mark Peranson introduces Issue 34: "I take a look and I'm truly surprised to see how much that follows covers films that screened in Berlin.... And this was a festival roundly scorned, by myself included, one where a truly rank competition led to a rank Golden Bear.... So do we judge a festival by the few interesting films, or the horrors?"

Regardless, Cinema Scope is, for the most part, focusing on the upside, beginning with Mark Peranson's own interview with James Benning: "Those familiar with Benning's recent landscape films will be comforted by the fixed camera and the film's continental scope, but RR marks something of, dare I say, a crucial advance."

"Undeniably, there is some poetic justice to the fact that United Red Army, Wakamatsu Koji's monumental chronicle of the excited emergence and devastating disintegration of Japan's ultra-left movement, towered head and shoulders above this year's pimply Berlinale edition," writes Christoph Huber. "After all, it was 43 years ago at the Berlin film festival that Wakamatsu's career kicked into high gear."

Tom Charity talks with Lance Hammer about Ballast, whose "minimalist aesthetic is not what we might expect from a former art director on studio blockbusters like Batman and Robin (1997). As he made clear when we met, Hammer has already served his time in the studio system; he's not desperate to break back into it."

"Watching The Feature, vidéaste Michel Auder's return to filmmaking (on HD video; co-directed by Andrew Neel, grandson of the late artist Alice Neel, Auder's longtime friend and frequent subject), which premiered in the Forum at this year's Berlinale, a sense of length becomes almost painfully pronounced, and not just because the film is long, which it is at 2 hours and 54 minutes," writes Andréa Picard. "The overriding sense of summation that fidgets through the fictionalized auto-portrait likewise induces a squirmy viewing, though surprisingly, that's a product of its strength, of its flashes of raw humanity cloaked in a narcissism too grand and too self-aware to be real."

Now about that Golden Bear. Quintín has definitely the most interesting, possibly the most provocative and very likely the best piece on Elite Squad we'll see.

On to the items, then, that have nothing to do with the Berlinale:

Michael Sicinski on Alexander Sokurov: "Tracing all the threads in adequate detail would be impossible here, but suffice to say, we have his video work, his dictator trilogy, and his familial films. Alexandra can best be understood as the juncture of all three, and that's why even though it seems like humanist arthouse fodder to the point of being comically quaint, it's ultimately very bizarre."

Once again, Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Global Discoveries on DVD" is too bountiful for any one running theme to keep up with it, but the touchstone here is "critical editions, with extras that do a lot to enhance the original films."

Adam Nayman: "It matters not a whit that Diary of the Dead is a dreadful movie: its themes are easily discernable, and thus it has been subject to high-end critical cooing."

Posted by dwhudson at April 6, 2008 3:54 PM