Cinema Scope. 35.

It's the wake-of-Cannes issue of Cinema Scope. "Today's auteurism at times risks running its course, at least in its popular formulation: films that can easily be read as works similar to, or fitting into, a filmmaker's extant oeuvre, films that gaze inwards rather than searching outwards," writes editor Mark Peranson. "To revert to English: though far from awful, Cannes creaked with too-frequent examples of the world's greatest filmmakers presenting far from their most interesting recent works, especially in a less-than-memorable Competition. In other words, the art was safe and sellable. Or, just as plausibly, I was the patsy who was tired, and often punch drunk. Let's call it a split decision."

As for the Palme d'Or-winner, Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs (The Class), it's "a crowdpleaser,' writes Richard Porton. "Certainly not without its charms, Cantet's film is primarily intriguing for the contradictions it embodies, as well as its ambivalent view of the French educational system and the ideological consensus it represents."

"Right from the buzzing, symptomatically absurd opening shots of Mafiosi getting tans in the confines of a solarium, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah grabs you with a strong sense of visual expressiveness and never ceases to let go," writes Christoph Huber: "the film is nothing short of a pile-up of images powerful in both concrete and metaphorical ways. What's staggering about the hot-cool style of this remarkable, slightly unconventional, and strictly unglamorous Mafia epic is that despite the (self-)conscious large-scale significance underlying its matter-of-factly presented narrative patchwork, the spaces, gestures, sounds, and (telling) details from which it is constructed feel entirely lived-in."

Robert Koehler reviews Albert Serra's El cant dels ocells (Birdsong), "created out of the building blocks of genuine religious belief and the faith in the camera's power to convey and transform one's sense of time, duration, and position on the earth below the sky, which in this case is an actual heaven - and by the very act of filming explaining once and for all in visual terms why the ancients believed in a heaven. This is the Bazin root, alongside Catholic conviction and adherence to film's capacity for modern art-making, which is to find meaning and form out of a necessarily rough process that's very willing to stumble and make mistakes. In fact, errors are the point."

Jason Anderson talks with Terence Davies about Of Time and the City.

Moving onto another festival, Brandon Wee looks back on this year's edition of Hot Docs.

Olaf Möller has been paging through books on East and South-East Asian cinemas.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Global Discoveries on DVD" column is a straightforward affair this time around: dozens of titles and/or filmmakers, some in groups, arranged alphabetically and commented on.

"Both Baghead and Frownland offer early proof of their post-postmod, pre-apocalyptic place in American life with opening scenes of their characters watching variably scary movies," writes Rob Nelson. "But of course there's no one way to watch a movie these days, and whatever their similarities as works of low-fi/Gen-Y horror, Baghead and Frownland are as different from one another as smile and snarl."

"If we can trace lines of evolution, and even discrete periods, within [Chris] Marker's assorted output, the films—and the ongoing history they chronicle—so often double back on their predecessors that the effect is of a palimpsest," writes Andrew Tracy, who's also got an online viewing tip. "A guided tour through a virtual museum of Marker's store of film images, this 'Farewell to Movies' (as per the opening title) characteristically undercuts the supposedly valedictory air with tantalizing glimpses of a cinema history heretofore unknown."

Posted by dwhudson at July 11, 2008 8:28 AM