Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 2
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
8/365: Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) (Amazon Prime)
Technically Marty’s fourth feature, this nerve-jangling, petty-gangster indie landed with a boom in the Nixon era, and felt like an arrival — it burned with feeling, with conviction, and with a sense of absolute authenticity. (New York Italian culture, down to the chintzy bar decor and Sicilian slang, had never been seen on film by the world before.) Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro arrived, too, but the passions were Scorsese’s, making a raw portrait of the neighborhood and people he knew like the back of his hand. A thousand petty-gangster indies have been launched in imitation of it in the decades since, but the original still lights up.
9/365: L’Age d’Or (Luis Bunuel, 1930) (YouTube)
“Instruments of aggression” is how a title card characterizes the scorpion’s pincers, in Bunuel’s famous found-footage doc opening, and it’s a suitable way of thinking about this landmark Surrealist film — as a joyous weapon. It’s barely a narrative, brimming with wild affronts to society, a film gone thoroughly off its meds, grabbing at a dream of liberty, and from it nearly a century of alternative, punk, rebel cinema has been born. In its day it caused a riot — Parisian right-wing groups protested and physically decimated the theater in which it played (slashing Dali and Ernst paintings hanging in the lobby as they went), and it was censored everywhere.
10/365: The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpytsky, 2014) (Netflix, Vimeo)
It’s a freak — a Ukrainian film entirely about Deaf teenagers, their frantic, angsty life of signage presented without subtitles. It’s essentially a silent film, an experience of eruptive human narrative structured by language the vast majority of of its audience will not understand. The teens, devious criminals surviving in a dilapidated orphanage, are living secrets, but of course you understand the crises of the story all too well. For the first time in movies, we witness the expression of wild psychodramatic emotion in utter quiet, with only a few grunts and the rustle of fast-moving hands to fill the rooms.
11/365: Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010) (Hulu, Amazon Prime)
A true indie coup — a low-budget sci-fi film that imagines half of Mexico to be infested with giant aliens (they look like silo-sized octopi walking on their tentacles) and is therefore officially quarantined. Part of the wonder here is the how — the director, DP and two actors went into Mexico and Central America with “off the shelf” HD video equipment, and used the real strife-scarred terrain and locals (most of whom thought they were in a documentary). Then, Edwards seamlessly added a novel’s worth of digital context — signs, hazmat logos, TV news reports, cartoons, a giant border wall, and the aliens themselves. Fabulously convincing.
12/365: Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953) (Amazon Prime)
You may have heard of Kurosawa and Ozu, but Kenji Mizoguchi is the third corner of the classical Japanese film triangle, and this is his necessary masterpiece, a sorcerous parable set in the feudal era that dissects human folly and breaks your heart with ghosts. Mizoguchi’s film are, among other things, tragic diagrams of gender inequity, a kneejerk issue for many filmmakers coming after him, but one the man plumbed so relentlessly it became his signature.
13/365: Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015) (Netflix)
Maybe the best recent film about the worldwide refugee tumult, this French movie tracks a trio of Tamil refugees (an ex-soldier, a woman and a girl, all strangers posing as a family) as they try to survive in a drug-gang-run slum outside Paris. It’s tough, tense and eloquent, and politically resonant.
14/365: The Black Book (a.k.a. Reign of Terror) (Anthony Mann, 1949) (YouTube)
A one-of-a-kind Gothic noir, set during the espionage of the French Revolution, as stylized and shadowy as a mutant Welles film, with a spy plot tangled like taffy, amid an assault of ghoulish closeups, painted shadows, dark alleys and brooding deceit. The actors all think they’re in a horror movie, and the mise-en-scene agrees with them. Sure, the screenplay seems to be counter-revolutionary, or perhaps merely anti-autocracy, if you can untangle the allegiances and backstabbings amid the stressed–out gloom, but with its sweaty concern over a list list of named names, the film’s actually “about” the blacklisting Red Scare that was tearing up Hollywood.
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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
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