Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 4
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
22/365: L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) (Amazon Prime)
A semi-Surrealist, swooningly poetic early talkie that lives in the hearts of many cinephiles as their favorite film of all time, this French romance simply involves a rash barge owner, his naive new wife, their very eccentric first mate, and the ways in which the outside world tries to sabotage their happiness. The director, Jean Vigo, made only three films — this, a short, and the unforgettable schoolyard-rebellion saga Zero de Conduite (1933) — before dying of TB at the age of 29, which only makes this masterpiece feel more graceful and melancholy.
23/365: JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Less than a movie than an epic trial brief, a pioneering achievement in forensic cinema, indicting as it does the entirety of the U.S. government in the matter of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone’s blitzkrieg arms itself with everything but the kitchen sink: hyperbolic flashbacks, propaganda editing, political-campaign exaggeration, loads of great acting and stunt casting (Gary Oldman as Oswald!), and, most importantly, acres of real, hard, troubling facts. You can’t swallow all of it, but for every aw-c’mon stroke there are a hundred haunting unanswered questions about what happened.
24/365: Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) (Amazon Prime)
The inaugural film of Italian Neo-Realism, this portrait of Italy under the Nazis during WWII was shot, in 1944, in the same streets the Nazis occupied just months before — and with loads of actual Romans as extras, reliving their experience for Rossellini, as the war still raged in the north of the country. The raw, merciless authenticity of it stunned audiences in the day, and initiated a worldwide trend of gritty truth-telling in movies.
25/365: Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003) (YouTube)
Starting in the mid-‘80s, Taiwan experienced a full-on New Wave of its very own, spearheaded by Hou Hsaio-hsien, Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang. This strange, experimental film, Tsai’s sixth, is set entirely inside an old Taipei movie theater, during its last 90 minutes of business, and the last 90 minutes of King Hu’s 1967 martial-arts classic Dragon Inn. We don’t watch the movie, though — we watch the sparse audience, the projectionist, the ticket seller, the sleepers, wanderers, tourists, trysters, and ghosts. Almost no dialogue, long patient shots, loads of mystery.
26/365 Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988) (Hulu)
Maybe the most heartbreaking Japanese anime of all time, Takahata’s cult classic is also one of the most unusual — as in, it eschews fantasy and sci-fi for a lyrical realism, following a teenage boy and his five-year-old sister during WWII as they try to survive alone in the firebombed landscape surrounding Kobe and Osaka. Made amidst the mainstreaming anime boom of the ’80s — amidst the giant robots and martial arts fantasies and “magic girl” series — this early Studio Ghibli production is gorgeous and achingly sad in equal measure.
27/365: Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) (Hulu)
From the rich filmography of renegade auteur Nicholas Ray, this bizarre feminist anti-Western turns the genre’s default masculine ideas upside down, pitting Joan Crawford’s defiant, independent saloon-owner against embittered rival Mercedes McCambridge and the cattle town’s rage over the incoming railroad. Men struggle for autonomy here, but it’s the women who decide the plot, around which Ray fashioned a crazy, hyperbolic, full-color fantasia of the West, with obvious parallels to the then-current McCarthy Red Scare witch-hunts. Generations of feminist and LGBTQ fans since have given this film an iconic status.
28/365: The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Orson Welles’ notorious second film, a dense and masterful adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel about a decaying Midwestern family, and a movie that initially promised to outdo Citizen Kane — until the film was reedited in Welles’ absence by the studio, cleaving off its final half-hour and replacing it with one of movie history’s worst summing-up shots. Thus began Welles’ chaotic career spiral; still, it’s a great film, and the spiteful tone-deafness of the ending has to be seen to be believed. That missing 30-odd minutes remains one of cinema’s most longed-for lost cans of celluloid.
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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.
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