Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 37
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
253/365: Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Using a Marguerite Duras screenplay, New Wave meta-man Alain Resnais had a big international hit with this brooding postwar art film in which a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) and a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) have dreamy sex and talk about their mutual, tragic pasts, and the struggle of memory and forgetting, as it intersects with the fallout of the war, in Europe and at ground zero in Hiroshima. Impassioned, gritty-glamorous, provocatively experimental in structure but never less than heartfelt, it’s the film that kicked off the Left Bank side of the French New Wave, and introduced into that seminally grungy Zeitgeist a dose of heady intellectual esprit.
254/365: A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
This Iranian global hit made its director a star, and who’s surprised: its razor-sharp plotting, acting and shooting style is as gripping as modern movies get, while at the same time diving right into the social firefight that is Iranian gender politics. A couple (Peyman Maadi and Leila Hatami) are trying to divorce; she is set on moving out of Iran, for feminist reasons only hinted at; he must stay to care for his Alzheimer’s-inflicted father. She moves out, and so he must hire a woman to care for the old man during the day, which she attempts to do while pregnant, violating a raft of taboos. What social catastrophes happen thereafter, often with the couple’s stunned and sensible 11-year-old daughter caught in the middle, and keep happening, like a cascade of exploding dominoes, until everyone’s lives are broken in half. The entire story hinges, craftily, on what Sharia law dictates that women can or cannot do in Iran — as in, they cannot touch a man who is not their husband — and a pivotal moment involves just such a touch — or was it a shove? — that we never quite see. It’s a fabulously subversive film, weaving the issues into the shatteringly tense narrative that dares even Iranian clerics to empathize with the problems such fervent patriarchy creates.
255/365: Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) (Hulu, YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The first self-consciously iconic road movie, this hippie-era totempole is one of a handful of American movies that stand as markers of a moment of 20th-century cultural identity-making. A two-man chopper trip from LA to New Orleans, with a ripping rock soundtrack and no other agenda but to find “America,” the film is both dramatically vague and amazingly vivid. Hopper took a small crew and his co-stars — Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson — on an actual road trip, using real locations and people, and understanding that the very fact of ceaseless travel, across byways and social landscapes American movies had always ignored, was in itself a revolutionary statement. The ‘Nam-era idea of semi-outlaw road-rangin’ became crystallized, and “Born to be Wild” became the road anthem for generations of drivers since.
256/365: Vampyr (Carl Dreyer, 1932) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Austere cinema master Carl-Theodor Dreyer — in his first sound film — tried his hand at an outright horror film on assignment, but the end-product cannot be anything the dilettante producers anticipated. Gauzy, somnambulistic, fog-clogged to the point of dislocation, Dreyer’s film is based on a Sheridan Le Fanu vampire story, but is less a tale told than a suffocating dream endured. Dreyer produces passages that loiter in your skull, particularly the funeral march as seen from inside the coffin. Independently made and badly preserved, the sound is unreliable, and the multi-national cast never seems comfortable with whatever language they’re speaking. All to the better.
257/365: United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Vudu)
A minute-by-minute recreation of the unendurable: the lead-up to and 46-minute flight of the 9/11 plane that was headed for the Capitol Building but, due to passengers’ interventions, crashed in a Pennsylvania field instead. Greengrass has proven to be a lead-footed Bourne journeyman, but with this film’s merciless intimacy and moral force, he’s earned a place on the top shelf.
258/365: Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
After years as a film journalist, Bogdanovich entered the American New Wave with this elegant, creepy indie, about the conjoining paths of an elderly horror-film star on a public-appearance tour (Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself), and a nondescript young man (Tim O’Kelly) who inexplicably decides to go on a killing spree. Inspired by the Charles Whitman sniper siege of two years earlier, the film’s placid depiction of irrational American violence may speak more to our present day, when these events are so common they’ve acquired a public safety acronym: IMCE, or Intentional Mass Casualty Events.
259/365: Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2016) (Amazon Prime, Netflix, Vudu)
Nobody’s quite made a movie this way before: Linklater chronicled the life of an American boy by filming one scene, one chunk of life, every year for ten years, during which his star (nonpro Ellar Coltrane) matures from seven to 17, just as his divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) age a decade and struggle with dissolving lives. Three hours long, and sometimes less than dramatic, it remains a remarkable achievement; only intermittently do you realize during any given moment that Coltrane’s brooder is a full year older than he was a moment before. Time passes, as it does.
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, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36
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.
