Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 45
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
309/365: Letter Never Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1959) (Criterion Channel)
A long-unavailable masterpiece from the pioneering plan sequence godheads Mikhail Kalatozov and DP Sergei Urusevsky, this stirring, eye-popping Soviet odyssey employs an arsenal of free-ranging mobile camera, infrared stock, infinite range, and deep compositions to limn the doomed tale of a four-person geological team (three men and Soviet New Wave goddess Tatiana Samojlova, a recipe for trouble) hunting for diamonds in Siberia. The elements turn against the starry-eyed team, of course, and the tragic story is electrified by the film’s visual assault and battery, which is shot almost 100% on-location in the Arctic Circle, Flaherty-Herzog-style, but which nevertheless careens, starting with its first unearthly helicopter shot, from the Dantean to the ur-Gothic to passages that are only Kalatozovian. The entire middle third of the film entails an endless forest fire from which the team must escape, and instead of taking the safe and short route, with establishing shots abetted by detailed close-ups, Kalatozov shoots his characters in a series of stupefying tracking shots through the inferno, up close but always moving, in and out of the burning trees and cyclonic smoke clouds. All masters of breath-holding mise-en-scene, from Tarkovsky and Jancso to Sokurov and Tarr, nod first to Kalatozov, even if all of his films were in fact Soviet propaganda. If this isn’t pure cinema — plastic masterliness that renders its formulaic materials not even moot but beautiful — there may not be such a thing.
310/365: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998) (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Gilliam’s blasted film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s beloved, infamous memoir-novel — “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream” — is as much about the book’s accumulation of nasty, rebellious cultural significance still to this day, as it is about Thompson and America circa 1971. Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), misbehaving on a scale that would shame an African despot, dive into the most decadent of American metropoli, in what is from the outset an apocalyptic lost weekend spent escaping from, responding to, and mustering conceptual-art commentary on the hypocritical middle-class bad dream that was mid-century American life. Del Toro, as the monstrous, puke-prone, knife-wielding sociopath of the two, is an unforgettable presence, but it’s Depp’s movie: his Duke is just as fearlessly stylized as his Ed Wood, possessed of a mannered diction that sounds like Mel Blanc doing Alexander Haig, and a loopy body language that aims to mime the conflicting influences of amyl nitrate and blotter acid.
311/365: Canoa (Felipe Cazals, 1976) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
A prizewinner at Berlin in its day and yet all but forgotten outside of Mexico, this self-knowing handgrenade of a movie feels like Costa-Gavras, in his peak years, crafting a stew of The Ox-Bow Incident and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Except, crucially, it’s all true, and so meticulous you could write your own police report about the real 1968 incident, in which a stoked anti-Communist mob of 2000 village peasants descended on a visiting party of young university clerks and tore them to pieces. Cazals’ film is so focused on the history — only eight years had passed since the Canoa lynchings and the famous Tlatelolco student massacre two weeks later — that his film never forgets itself as a document of outrage. The film maintains an unadorned, even peasant-rough Third Cinema aesthetic, and the slow-burn, clock-ticking build-up to the riot is, therefore, surprisingly tense and upsetting, particularly when you keep in mind that the film was shot in the exact locations of the incident, with crowds of townspeople as extras. Blunt and bloody, the movie is a piece of history itself, graphically delineating the era’s collision course between autocratic power and generational discontent, a process that tore up Mexico in its own “dirty war.”
312/365: The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015) (Hulu, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Often, making documentaries is all about off-screen friendship and trust, and can be weighed as a craft of relationships, like espionage, with most of the real work done in private. It’s the only way something like Moselle’s film could’ve been made, as she opens a window on the lives of six young brothers, products of a Peruvian father and a midwestern mother, who grew up almost entirely sequestered in their cluttered Lower East Side apartment, hidden from the world. The six brothers are not feral, though, just home-schooled, sheltered from reality, heavily bonded as siblings, and absurdly saturated in Hollywood movies, videos of which flowed into the house in a ceaseless stream. Fabulously charming, with big relaxed smiles, serene dispositions, matching black warrior hair, Sanskrit names, and a zest for performance that puts them perfectly at ease in front of this stranger’s camera, which makes sense, given their compulsive and passionate relationship with movies, which the brothers would transcribe into scripts and then, in full handmade regalia, reenact. Running up and down their hallway brandishing fake pistols, the Angulas are whole-hog cinephiles and cineastes and merry children all at once, living and breathing the let’s-pretend essence of the medium. Moselle even captures the septet hitting the streets together in suits and sunglasses a la Reservoir Dogs, and catches one brother in his elaborate Batman suit brooding by the window in a moment right out of The Dark Knight. The movie remains a testament to movie love, and how acculturated, against all odds, you could become on a steady diet of Hollywood daydreams.
313/365: Good Night and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005) (Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A meticulous period piece shot in pearly, newsy black-&-white, Clooney’s passion project sticks closely to the details at hand: the slow step up to the plate performed in 1953 by popular CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (David Straithairn) in defiant response to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Red HUAC witchhunt, essentially constituting a sole voice crying in a wilderness of shit-scared American journalism. Clooney loves the milieu (he grew up in ’50s broadcasting), and his priorities lie with Murrow’s nonchalant heroism, using his career and reputation to face down a public demon no one else dares cross — and with the duties of media to support the citizenry, not, as Murrow says in a podium polemic, “to distract, delude, denude and isolate us.” It’s an invigorating day-trip into a more sophisticated yesteryear, and maybe something of an eye-opener for viewers born since the Nixon Administration, for whom an anchorman who speaks in multiple clauses, who quotes from Shakespeare and whose basic righteousness dictated his actions, is as familiar as a politician with respect for his constituents. McCarthy, playing himself in the preserved video nightmares of television’s messy adolescence, scans as one part Nixon, one part Cheney and one part insecure Lex Luther, bawling and huffing his way to infamy.
314/365: La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Four epic hours long, this was the late, great French New Waver’s biggest international hit, a submersive act of captivity that traps us in a room with the unreasonable struggle of art-making, and with a relentlessly nude Emmanuelle Beart as our gateway drug. We’re in the south of France, in the 18th-century Chateau d’Assas, where a prickly young beauty is shanghai’ed into modeling for an aging master (Michel Piccoli) who hasn’t painted anything significant in years. And so it begins: the mysterious creative process takes center stage, and never lets go. The drawings and painting itself — executed by semi-abstract-nude artist Bernard Dufour, upon whom Piccoli’s character is roughly based — are an endless series of starts and stops, inspired launches and petered-out surrenders. Pacing in his cavernous castle-cellar studio, the artist bends the exposed girl into pretzels (in effect desexualizing her), as he does the hard inner work of finding something that’s both brand new and truthful about whatever it is he sees in the girl’s form. The power play between the two ebbs and flows, but there’s an electric urgency to their project, based entirely on an ideal, on the belief in the importance of the finished painting, whatever it may end up being. In fact, as hours pass, it becomes clear that the completed work is actually secondary to the process itself — like Rivette, the painter hunts for the authenticity in the act. Making is the state of grace, not having made.
315/365: A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Another four-hour monster, rarely seen until recently at its full length (if seen at all), this Taiwanese masterpiece is one of those films that defines itself as a truth-telling spokes-work for a entire cultural state of youthful being. It’s the 1961 Taipei of Yang’s youth, a lingering tropical paradise beset by more than a decade of unwanted Chinese citizens immigrating by the millions from the mainland’s civil war and subsequent Communist government. The resulting hothouse, perpetuated by the Kuomintang martial law that wasn’t lifted until 1987, created an uneasy social landscape of disposable citizens, bureaucratic malevolence and generational combat; territorial high school gangs waged war in the nightened middle-class streets, between tank convoy runs. The canvas envelopes 20 or more characters — adolescent or preadolescent gang members, hangers-on, siblings and bystanders, parents, school administrators — but eventually we hone in on the habitually defiant 15-year-old Si’r (Chen Chang), and his complex crisis of allegiance and understanding. Taiwan being Taiwan, virtually everything suggests fundamental dislocations: the residue of the Japanese (“Eight years of war with Japan,” Si’r’s mother gripes, “now we live in a Japanese house, and have to listen to Japanese music.”), the ubiquitous American pop (the film’s title is a line from Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”), the random passing of Army tanks, the frequent blackouts, the Americanized gang monikers (Honey, Threads, Sex Bomb, Underpants, etc.), the giant ice blocks seen long before we understand what they’re for (suspected radicals are made to sit on them by state interrogators while writing their confessions), the movie being shot in the studio next to the school that never actually seems to get underway, and (almost) infinitely on. We only discover at the end that the film is a bolero, rising silently to a chilling moment of climactic violence, inspired from a true incident.
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, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44
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