Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 17
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
113/365: La Jetee (Chris Marker, 1962) (Vimeo, YouTube)
The only French New Wave sci-fi short ever adapted into a Hollywood movie (Terry Gilliam’s 1995 headtrip Twelve Monkeys), this utterly original film limns a complex time-travel-heading-off-the-apocalypse tale entirely using stark, brooding black-&-white still photographs — except for one revelatory moment of movement. Marker was the New Wave’s secret agent, working in many forms (docs, experiments, animations, essays, etc., but never narrative features) and staying defiantly behind the scenes, and though his filmography runs to over 75 hours of often radical work, he remains underexplored by cinephiles. You could say that this famous short, complete with killer twist ending, is atypical of Marker’s oeuvre, if there was anything typical about it at all.
114/365: Kicking and Screaming (Noah Baumbach, 1995) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Here was a sparkling late-century’s generational anthem film, except no one seemed terribly interested in identifying with it. Writer/director Baumbach’s debut is a rueful portrait of four preppy, Ivy League-ish friends living off-campus, suddenly left in the weird afterworld where graduation has marked them as grown-ups but the indulgent, trivia-obsessed allure of college life maintains its grip. Baumbach poured a hundred college careers’ worth of ironic humor into the script, and Chris Eigeman, Josh Hamilton and Carlos Jacott are a dry riot. Eric Stoltz almost steals the movie in an improvised role as a philosophical bartender, but it’s hard not to fall for Olivia d’Abo as an impulsive creative-writing major too aware of her braces. Graceful and bittersweet in a way none of the filmmakers have been since.
115/365: Freaks (Tod Browning, 1933) (Vudu)
Nothing in the annals of Hollywood history could ever prepare you for this notorious oddball, an early-talkie moral fable-slash-exploitation melodrama wherein seasoned gothic auteur Tod Browning, after a series of Lon Chaney hits and the success of Dracula in 1931, uses real circus freaks to essentially play themselves. The story, involving a golddigger scheme and betrayal and revenge, is simple and primal, pitting the circus’ “normals” against the tribe of the freaks, who remain, despite our 21st-century correctness, uncanny and disturbing and fascinating, despite also being (as they were meant to be in 1933) sympathetic and real. There are images here that can steal your sleep, but at the same time the film has evolved into a bloodthirsty celebration of Otherness — the freaks’ chant of “one of us, one of us!” is today virtually an anthem of Other-feeling, as it’s been quoted by The Ramones, South Park, The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, ad infinitum.
116/365: Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983) (Amazon Prime)
The great Russian metaphysicist made this dreamlike odyssey in Italy after finally leaving the USSR, and of his seven features it’s the least known and seen, a wholly metaphoric search for meaning and belonging, as an exiled Russian poet in Tuscany (Oleg Yankovsky), longing for his wife and homeland, makes a spiritual pact with an anarchist madman (Erland Josephson). Largely autobiographical — Tarkovsky would never go home again — the movie is a hypnotic storm of breath-holding set-pieces, and some of the most remarkable long tracking shots in the history of movies.
117/365: Heat (Michael Mann, 1995) (Netflix)
Mann’s magnum opus, an existentialist cops-&-robbers saga that exudes a sense of grandeur and doom, while expanding its basic set-up (twisted cop Al Pacino tracks ice-hearted heist master Robert De Niro) with a web of subplots and ancillary characters that expand out in every direction. It’s like a novel, with every character the protagonist in their own story, from Ashley Judd’s blackmail-caught wife to William Fichtner’s corporate weasel to Jon Voight’s life-weathered fence to Amy Brenneman’s innocent girl-from-out-of-town. The action is so real it happens before you know it, and only Pacino’s extroverted alpha-dog performance threatens to upset the film’s tense equilibrium.
118/365: White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) (YouTube, Vudu)
Another kind of crime film — a particularly nasty film noir in which James Cagney, pugnacious working-class-hero movie icon for almost two decades by this point, takes his punk-gangster persona up ten notches into sheer psychopathic territory. His Cody Jarrett was something Hollywood movies hadn’t seen before: mother-obsessed, seizuratic, impulsively homicidal, a walking time-bomb of a man on a crazed crime spree. One of the most compelling movie personalities America ever produced, Cagney never did anything without a sense of 100% conviction, and his malevolent maniac-thief is unforgettable.
119/365: Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) (Amazon Prime)
Movies’ first dystopia, Fritz Lang’s sci-fi epic was the most expensive film ever made in Europe, and there’s no overlooking (especially in the latest 148-minute restored version) the film’s monstrous spectacle, innovative F/X, and world-crafting design achievement (of which the famous “robotrix” is prototypical). The futuristic society here is quite Hunger Games-ish, divided between of elites and slaves, and brought crashing down by the activism of a young woman (Brigitte Helm) and the scheming of a lovelorn, robot-manufacturing mad scientist (Rudolph Klein-Rogge). Politically the film is naive at best, but the iconography remains stunning, and it’s an integral part of our shared cultural vocabulary. Today, the anarchist cry of “Death to the machines!” has a slightly different reverb.
Smashcut 365 is a weekly recommendation of films for budding cinephiles — seven films a week, one a day, no repeats — ranging from classic masterpieces to new and provocative indies and imports, intended to kickstart your cinephilic habit.
Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
Keep up with Smashcut 365 by following Smashcut on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
What is Smashcut?
Smashcut partners with universities and organizations to develop and deliver customized online film programs. The Smashcut platform enables a high degree of collaborative instruction and features real-time student project review via live 1:1 video sessions with instructors. Smashcut is dedicated to increasing access to film education, and supporting a broad population of emerging film students. Learn more at Smashcut.com. Learn more at Smashcut.com.
