Mark Peranson
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Articles by Mark Peranson
From the Vision to the Nail in the Coffin, and the Resurrection: Dimitris Athiridis on "exergue – on documenta 14" - Cinema Scope
By Antoine Thirion 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 following the silencing of voices in Germany condemning Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Objects of Desire: Rodrigo Moreno on "The Delinquents"
By Jordan Cronk “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 perhaps that movement’s most underestimated talent.
Issue 97 Editor's Note
By Mark Peranson 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 sustainable financially without begging for money, or sustainable emotionally without driving me to a premature death; if anything, I should have pulled the plug in 2020, so consider the last few issues as gravy.
Your Own Hall of Fame: Alex Ross Perry on "Videoheaven" and "Pavements"
By Adam Nayman 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, programmed at a festival, or even announced via trailers or posters, it’s tricky to write about their intricacies, either as standalone works or in conversation with one another.
Face the Music: Hamaguchi Ryusuke on "Evil Does Not Exist"
By Beatrice Loayza 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 spell, appears like latticework through which daylight passes with an eerie vibrancy.
Cinema Scope 97 Table of Contents
Face the Music: Hamaguchi Ryusuke on Evil Does Not Exist by Beatrice Loayza Your Own Hall of Fame: Alex Ross Perry on Videoheaven and Pavements by Adam Nayman Objects of Desire: Rodrigo Moreno on The Delinquents by Jordan Cronk From the Vision to the Nail in the Coffin, and the Resurrection: Dimitris Athiridis on exergue – on documenta 14 by Antoine Thirion Last of the Independents: A Roundtable on Charley Varrick with Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala by Christoph Huber Deep Cuts: The First...
Open Source: Some Films by Ross Meckfessel
By Phil Coldiron 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 thought experiments imply comic narratives—that is, to borrow a definition, ones which resolve in favour of their protagonists. And who might these protagonists be? In the former, I suppose the answer is obvious enough: us.
Film Tourists in Los Angeles
By Thom Andersen 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 in 2018. The directors who did the most to make Los Angeles a character in movies and then a subject were outsiders, like Wim Wenders and Billy Wilder, or tourists, like Antonioni.
Deep Cuts: The First International Women’s Film Seminar
By Erika Balsom 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 it “the year’s most unlikely media trend.” Their idea of what this looks like is a bit different than mine; not everyone is “suddenly” lining up to see Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
Last of the Independents: A Roundtable on "Charley Varrick" with Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
By Christoph Huber 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-system notion nestled inside this tale of a crop-duster pilot who has resorted to small-scale robbery for a living because he can no longer compete against the capitalist monopoly in his legal job.
The Sense of the Past: Terence Davies (1945–2023) - Cinema Scope
By Lawrence Garcia Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
Thom Andersen, Author at Cinema Scope
Okay, I have a fascination with lists: best of, worst of, whatever. I would even claim they’re useful as a quick sketch of history, revealing which films are remembered, which are forgotten. In Film Comment’s best-of-decade poll, for example, I was pleased to see that so many films I admired were remembered by others, and… Read More →
The Killer (David Fincher, US)
By Adam Piron 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, nameless assassin (Michael Fassbender) using his hands to execute his trade.
Global Discoveries on DVD: Reassessments
By Jonathan Rosenbaum One advantage to growing older is having more opportunities to reassess and reflect. This isn’t only a matter of understanding and/or judging what one sees: it’s also a matter of evaluating why one has seen certain films and not seen certain others.
Deaths of Cinema | Cork Soaker: William Friedkin, 1935–2023 - Cinema Scope
By Chuck Stephens “The path was silver, grained with streaks of rose-gray, and the walls of the canyon were turquoise, mauve, chocolate and lavender.
Cinema Scope Table of Contents 96
Workingman’s Death: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World by Jordan Cronk Outside In: Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge 3 by Blake Williams The Phantom of the Opera: Atom Egoyan on Seven Veils by Adam Nayman Afterlife: Kleber Mendonça Filho on Pictures of Ghosts by Tom Charity First Looks: Chantal Akerman at 17 by Kate Rennebohm Savagery Begins at Home: The Film Rituals of Joshua Gen Solondz by Michael Sicinski The Arc of the Moral Universe: The Films of Deepa...
TIFF 2023 | Banel & Adama (Ramata-Toulaye Sy, France/Senegal/Mali) — Centerpiece - Cinema Scope
By Madeleine Wall The only directorial debut to make it into this year’s official Cannes competition, Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel & Adama is a clash of love and tradition in rural Senegal. At 18, Banel (Khady Mane) was widowed from Adama’s (Mamadou Diallo) brother, and as per tradition, he married her in his sibling’s place. This turns out to be a gift of fate, for the love the two have for each other is like nothing anyone in their village has seen.
TIFF 2023 | Wicked Little Letters (Thea Sharrock, UK) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Madeleine Wall Set in 1920s Littlehampton, England, Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters is a winking, ahistorical comedy. The upright and morally superior Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) has been receiving expletive laden poison pen letters. Living under the thumb of her father Edward (Timothy Spall) each one shakes the repressed household to their core. They eventually turn to the police, for they feel there can only be one culprit: their free spirited neighbour Rose (Jessie Buckley).
TIFF 2023 | Boil Alert (James Burns, Stevie Salas, Canada) — TIFF Docs - Cinema Scope
By Madeleine Wall Documentary filmmakers James Burns and Stevie Salas, who previously worked together on The Water Walker (2020), have again turned their camera to an Indigenous environmental activist. Serving as both audience and director proxies, Haudenosaunee activist Layla Staats is the structuring force of Boil Alert; her hero’s journey is to learn about the environmental disasters that multiple Indigenous communities must live in.
TIFF 2023 | Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland/ France) — Wavelengths - Cinema Scope
By Michael Sicinski Godard’s first posthumous work could be taken as a suicide note for cinema itself. Throughout his career, Godard repeatedly aimed to “return to zero,” to unlearn the discipline of filmmaking and begin again. But certain axioms always persisted, such as images, motion, and temporal progression. Phony Wars goes back before zero, before there was such a thing as cinema. Its first five minutes are presented in absolute silence.
TIFF 2023 | Sira (Apolline Traoré, Burkina Faso/Senegal/France/Germany) — Centrepiece - Cinema Scope
By Michael Sicinski Apolline Traoré’s latest film is direct, and in times of political strife there is undoubtedly something to be said for directness. Burkina Faso has become a hotbed of terrorism of late, with various factions affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara moving in from Niger and Mali.
TIFF 2023 | Working Class Goes to Hell (Mladen Đorđević, Serbia/Greece/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Croatia/ Romania) — Midnight Madness - Cinema Scope
By Gabrielle Marceau Mladen Đorđević’s Working Class Goes to Hell wears its title more literally than the 1971 Italian satire, The Working Class Goes to Heaven, it references.
TIFF 2023 | Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman, France/ US) — TIFF Docs - Cinema Scope
By Michael Sicinski In all likelihood, Frederick Wiseman is already prepping his next project. He is indefatigable. But if it happens that Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is his final film, it would be a fitting capstone to a singular career.
TIFF 2023 | A Normal Family (Hur Jin-ho, South Korea) — Gala Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Michael Sicinski Hur Jin-ho made his reputation on a handful of romantic dramas that were distinguished by their light touch and quiet rigour. It would be easy to complain about how leaden and overdetermined A Normal Family is in comparison to Christmas in August (1998) or One Fine Spring Day (2001), but let’s be honest. When’s the last time any of us even thought about those films?
TIFF 2023 | Reptile (Grant Singer, US) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Josh Lewis Among Netflix’s many crimes against artistry (the algorithmic dumping ground they greet their acquisitions with, back in the news: not paying their creatives fairly, etc.), one of the more underrated is their absorption of the trashy, stylish genre programmer.
TIFF 2023 | Quiz Lady (Jessica Yu, US) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Meg Shields It’s time to reset the clocks: we’ve got a genuinely delightful American studio comedy on our hands. Rising above its “hmm” status as a direct-to-Hulu original, Quiz Lady is a charming, unpretentious cinematic equivalent of mac ’n cheese. It’s not going to surprise you. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
TIFF 2023 | Poolman (Chris Pine, US) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Josh Lewis Of the dozen or so actor-turned-director features at TIFF this year few had as endearing a concept as Poolman; a Big Lewbowski-esque paranoid stoner-noir with a long-haired, short-shorts-attired Chris Pine as the himbo-goofball city council activist/pool cleaner Darren Barrenman (aka DB), who stumbles upon a literal Chinatown LA water conspiracy.
TIFF 2023 | Walls (Kasia Smutniak, Italy) — TIFF Docs - Cinema Scope
By Madeleine Wall Splattered over the news and the internet, Poland’s migrant crisis has been making headlines for years. In response, aggressive security measures have been installed, including building a 186-kilometer steel and barbed wire wall along the Belarus border to keep them out. Navigating more than one boundary, Kasia Smutniak’s documentary Walls is a first person look at the people who have built these structures, and those who try to elude them.
TIFF 2023 | Hell of a Summer (Finn Wolfhard, Billy Bryk, US/Canada) — Midnight Madness - Cinema Scope
By Adam Nayman Hell of a Summer marks the feature co-directorial debut of Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard; it’s a good bet that without his name on it, it wouldn’t be here.
TIFF 2023 | When Evil Lurks (Demián Rugna, Argentina) — Midnight Madness - Cinema Scope
By Adam Nayman In horror movies—as in life—rules are made to be broken. After learning that one of their fellow villagers has been infected with a demon, two ornery brothers—one a family man, one a wildcard, neither particularly bright—decide to transport the possessed party into the middle of nowhere: out of sight, out of mind.
TIFF 2023 | Mimang (Kim Taeyang, South Korea) — Discovery - Cinema Scope
By Angelo Muredda The more Seoul changes, the more it stays the same in Kim Taeyang’s understated and striking debut Mimang, which tracks the shifting fortunes and life milestones of a young illustrator and a film lecturer over a series of walks and drives through the city.
TIFF 2023 | Ru (Charles-Olivier Michaud, Canada) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Saffron Maeve Pulled from the pages of Kim Thúy’s award-winning novel of short reflections on family, refuge, and identity, Charles-Olivier Michaud’s Ru surveys an affluent Vietnamese family escaping to Quebec on the heels of the Fall of Saigon.
TIFF 2023 | The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow, US) — Centrepiece - Cinema Scope
By Saffron Maeve Making onscreen BDSM appear tedious and pedestrian is a great bit, not only because it seems to encapsulate the sexual incongruity of New Yorkers within a particular age bracket, but because it desaturates the very act of sex; it’s as if we’re watching a faucet drip or a mattress inflate.
TIFF 2023 | NAGA (Meshal Aljaser, Saudi Arabia) — Midnight Madness - Cinema Scope
By Josh Lewis The Midnight Madness program at TIFF wouldn’t be complete without at least one anxiety-inducing, run-all-night thriller, and this year’s comes courtesy of Saudi Arabian filmmaker Meshal Aljaser, who’s managed to find a specific spin on it: taking the relationship between rebellious daughter (Sara, played with a determined, frustrated intensity by Adwa Bader) and strict, conservative father, and mining it for survivalist horror resourcefulness.
TIFF 2023 | Dear Jassi (Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, India) — Platform - Cinema Scope
By Meg Shields It’s been eight years since Tarsem Singh released a movie. But that pales in comparison to the twenty years it took him to make Dear Jassi, a tragedy whose twists and turns would be unbelievable and overwrought if not for the horrifying fact that they really happened. The film dramatizes the events that led up to the murder of 24-year-old Jaswinder ‘Jassi’ Kaur, an Indo-Canadian woman who was the victim of an honour killing orchestrated by her mother and uncle.
TIFF 2023 | The Peasants (DK Welchman & Hugh Welchman, Poland/Serbia/Lithuania) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Madeleine Wall The young and beautiful Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is ripe for marriage, and every man in the village has eyes for her. Unfortunately, Jagna is only interested in the married Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), and their star-crossed romance is the kindling to Jagna’s demise.
TIFF 2023 | The Tundra Within Me (Sara Margrethe Oskal, Norway) — Discovery - Cinema Scope
By Madeleine Wall On her trip home to the northern village of Sápmi, Lena’s (Risten Anine Kvernmo Gaup) bus nearly hits a deer. This isn’t an unusual occurrence for the Sami community, whose relationship with reindeer is fundamental to their culture, but Lena notices the reindeer’s herder, Mahtte (Nils Ailu Kemi), for the first time. The reindeer runs off and the bus continues its route, but a connection between the two has been made.
TIFF 2023 | The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, Argentina/Brazil/Chile/Luxembourg) — Centrepiece - Cinema Scope
By Michael Sicinski El Custodio (2006), the last of Rodrigo Moreno’s films to really gain traction on the festival circuit, was a grim but rigourous portrait of life at the periphery of power. The Delinquents is something else entirely. It’s a deconstructed film noir, not in the Derridean but in the culinary sense. Across its three hours, it articulates the cost of greed, the physical difficulty of theft, and above all the importance of choosing the right accomplice.
TIFF 2023 | Knox Goes Away (Michael Keaton, US) — Special Presentations - Cinema Scope
By Adam Nayman Say what you will about Birdman, but as a legacy showcase for Micahel Keaton, it was right on time, mining the tension between its lead’s off-kilter charisma and unlikely superstardom. Knox Goes Away, meanwhile, is strictly Oscar bait, with Keaton serving as his own director in a showy role; the amnesiac gimmick and noir trimming evoke Memento, but those of us with slightly longer memories may get Sling Blade vibes as well (including from the final shot).
TIFF 2023 | The King Tide (Christian Sparkes, Canada) — Platform - Cinema Scope
By Josh Lewis “People die, remember?” East Coast island mayor Bobby (Clayne Crawford) calmly has to remind his wife Grace (Lara Jean Chorostecki) in The King Tide—a new slow burn quasi-folk horror indie drama from Newfoundland & Labrador-born director Christian Sparkes.
TIFF 2023 | 100 Yards (Xu Haofeng, Xu Junfeng, China) — Centrepiece - Cinema Scope
By Shelly Kraicer Chinese director, critic, novelist, and student of Taoist martial arts Xu Haofeng has made at least six beautifully crafted action films (five released, at least one in Chinese censorship limbo) since his wuxia debut The Sword Identity in 2011. 100 Yards, co-directed with his brother Xu Junfeng, is set in the Republican era in Tianjin, a Western-semi-occupied treaty port where French, US, British, and Italian powers ran their colonial enterprises.
TIFF 2023 | Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain) — In Conversation With… - Cinema Scope
By Saffron Maeve In which Pedro Almodóvar vows to suspend anachronisms and remain faithful to the genre of the Western: Strange Way of Life, the director’s latest 30-minute short sees two former lovers, Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva (Pedro Pascal), reuniting after 25 years, just as a murder is being pieced together in town. Due to a distinctive limp, Silva’s son is the prime suspect, and thus, his motivations for reconnecting with Jake—town sheriff and brother-in-law of the deceased—become tangly.
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