Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 27 — Special Sundance Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
183/365: Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Incredibly, the first film directed by an African-American woman to be theatrically released in America — 1991 — this dreamy, stylized historical indie explores the lives of a Gullah family on the islands off the Georgia coast in 1902, and it’s a unique stew of folklore, film-as-memory, historical detail, and a startling visual originality. (Winner, Excellence in Cinematography, Sundance 1991)
184/365: Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005) (Netflix)
Don’t flinch: a high school film noir, complete with Hammettian plot and a passion for antiquated gangster patois. It could seem dubious, but Johnson (with his first film) is drop-dead serious, and the film, which has a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt investigating his ex-girlfriend’s murder by local drug kingpins, is a spectacle of plain nerve, with the cast playing their teenage troubles out with utter conviction. (“I gave you Jared to see him eaten,” the hero tell’s the school’s dean-slash-G-Man, “not to see you fed.”) The cynicism of noir is deployed as a near-tears metaphor for pre-adult isolation, insecurity and self-destruction, and it’s such a simple fusion between potent American cultural ideas it feels sui generis. (Winner, Grand Jury Prize, Special Jury Prize for “Originality of Vision,” Sundance 2005)
185/365: Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) (Hulu, Amazon Prime)
From whence came Jennifer Lawrence, a dirty, grimey, cold-boned indie about a teenage girl trying to keep her family in their Ozarks house, by locating her outlaw father in a backwoods nightmare hellscape of meth labs, family vendettas and raging lawlessness. Granik, as with her newest film Leave No Trace, was all about using real locales and real people, and with JLaw holding the tension together with a star-making performance, the film itself lands on you like a very real blast of January chill. (Winner, Grand Jury Prize, Best Screenplay, Sundance 2010)
186/365: Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004) (Amazon Prime)
A true indie freakout. Carruth, a software developer who decided he could make this film virtually by himself, also stars as one of two tech-firm engineers who accidentally create a time machine in their garage. Or so we think: the film is so craftily elliptical, so confounding in its doubled-and-tripled-up mysteries, so immaculately crafted, and so devilishly written that it requires multiple viewings, during which you’ll tie your brain stem into knots keeping up. No other film better makes the case that great science fiction can be built from absolutely nothing but ideas. (Winner, Grand Jury Prize, Sundance 2004)
187/365: The Kindergarten Teacher (Sara Colangelo, 2018) (Netflix)
A nerve-wracking character study, all too shamefully ignored by awards this past season, in which Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a dissatisfied schoolteacher, longing to be a serious poet but failing and entering a middle-age funk, who becomes convinced that one of her class’s five-year-olds is a spontaneous poetical prodigy, and only she can nurture him to greatness. As you might guess, things get bad. Creepy and intense, and Gyllenhaal’s finest hour. (Winner, Best Directing, Sundance 2018)
188/365: The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
This beloved period-horror indie, which looks as though it could’ve been shot in the 1600s, squats with a colonist family alone on the edge of the New England wilderness, as various (and not particularly coherent) supernatural sieges take place, just beginning with the stealing and killing of a baby. Eggers never irons out exactly what is going on — each member of the family sees things differently — and by the end we’re in a hallucinatory Dore-does-Dante vision we’ll never know is “real.” (Winner, Best Directing, Sundance 2015)
189/365: Ballast (Lance Hammer, 2008) (Amazon Prime)
Hunt this one down — Hammer’s only film, shot in the wintery nowhere northlands of Mississippi, seethingly and broodingly exploring the intersection between a grieving man, the desperate single mother renting a shack from him, and her young teenage son, teetering on the brink of crime and ganghood. It’s all in how it’s shot and cut and how little is explained for us; it’s a film utterly devoid of bull, and as the fraying mother Tarra Riggs is a house on fire. (Winner, Best Directing, Best Cinematography, Sundance 2008)
Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
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.
