Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 47
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
323/365: Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
This early Kubrick bare-knuckler remains the definitive WWI-set anti-war film, much copied but never equaled, thanks largely to the bullet-train story cascade (streamlined from Humphrey Cobb’s book by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and pulp punk Jim Thompson), and Kubrick’s relentlessly ultra-real, disarmingly composed images. In the trench-riven French wastelands, there’s a stupid command to take an impossible hill, a subsequent slaughter, an officer’s corrupt outrage, and a military trial for a handful of randomly chosen scapegoat “cowards” to pay the price of the mission’s failure — the story is both modest and universal, and the 88-minute film carries no fat. Kirk Douglas, as the ethical center who cannot prevent the lunacy from winding tight around him, is so pressurized by rage and guilt you can see his rivets popping, and it may be the least grandiose, and most moving, performance of his still under-rated career. Anti-war films often make the mistake of characterizing armed conflict as just a generalized madness, and not the product of individuals’ amorality, ambition and greed. Not Kubrick’s — here, blame is placed with the career militarists, and how their decisions chew innocent men up like hamburger.
324/365: A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Hou Hsaio-hsien, 1985) (Amazon Prime)
If you take film seriously, sooner or later you face the fact that we’re living in the era of Hou — the Mozart of the Taiwanese New Wave is in his third decade of cinema-making, having become something of the arthouse-film gold standard worldwide, and schooling us all on slow-cinema eloquence, long-shot heartbreak, and stories you have to decipher from the messiness of life. It can seem like we still under-appreciate him. This formative work, his sixth film in as many years, may be his first masterpiece, a memoir-film about a family just like Hou’s, displaced to Taiwan from China, and wracked with a run of illnesses and dilemmas, as the protagonist grows up from an observant youngster into a rebellious teenager and beyond. The narrative isn’t laid out for us so much as hidden in the layers of life, seeping into view in Hou’s signature way. No one can create movie space as organically as he does (nothing ever feels set up for the camera); it’s lean-in cinema, respecting the regions in the characters’ lives we don’t see and can’t fathom.
325/365: The Magician (Ingmar Bergman, 1958) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
One of the less beloved wonder cabinets in the Bergman oeuvre, this odd Gothic puzzle might actually be one of the great Swede’s most confessional works, despite its roiling mix of saucy period farce, class critique, metaphysical horror and modernist unease. It’s actually a chamber piece in which an even dozen characters divided into three class teams (aristocratic/bureaucratic, servants, and interloper/vagabond) face off in a blandly opulent 19th century townhouse. The invaders are a small company of traveling mesmerists-cum-charlatans, led by the mute (Max Von Sydow) and his assistant (Ingrid Thulin), who are obviously from the outset not what they seem. What exactly they are is the evasive artichoke heart of the movie, as the troupe is confronted by a town’s pompous local authorities (Erland Josephson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, etc.) and humiliated and forced to demonstrate either the validity of their thaumaturgic claims or their harmlessness as barnstorming performers. What happens is devilishly impossible to quantify as either baloney or magic, but both sides of the science-vs.-“art” struggle seem to win and lose, in turn. Of course it’s a parable, a shadow-show examining the nettlesome relationship between the artist-filmmaker and the public. Every step through Bergman’s narrative falls on shaky textual ground — tricks are plumbed but are disturbing, false identities are exposed but preferred to reality, hypnotic suggestions vent authentic secrets but also manufacture outright illusions, “magic” affects “reality” and vice-versa. “Nothing is true,” someone says, which is as applicable a cinematic axiom as any, and yet here the artist’s role is to be misunderstood, scorned, asked for simplicities he cannot deliver.
326/365: Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A film out of nowhere — a loving, agenda-free, bewitchingly lyrical documentary about a small and forgotten Alabama town, filmed with unerring grace and affection by its own high school basketball coach. There’s no plot aside from various stories — more than one black high schooler hopes basketball will get him to college, and many more than that have little hope left for anything — amid the pervasive, unremarked-upon smog of poverty. Ross took five years to shoot his film, and people grow and change in the meantime, achieving a documentary force that no amount of cut-&-paste archivals-&-interview docs can achieve. Self-knowing, beautiful, unpatronizing, and lecture-free, it was easily the best and most original doc of 2018.
327/365: Michael (Carl Dreyer, 1924) (Amazon Prime)
One of Dreyer’s least noticed films, this silent German Expressionist treasure is as old-school about 19th-century ideas about art and class as it is thoroughly 21st-century in its subtle depiction of gay love. Co-written by Mrs. Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou, and shot by celeb shooters Karl Freund and Rudolph Mate, the film plumbs a tragic love triangle between a “master” artist (filmmaker Benjamin Christensen), his young model-boyfriend (an unrecognizable Walter Slezak) and a penniless Russian countess (Nora Gregor, before Renoir found her) both men hanker for. Brimming with what might be the most beautifully-shot interiors of the silent era, the movie is difficult to not watch, given the various poetic uses of spot-lighting and Christiansen’s startling performance and grand, Mephistopholeian visage. Typically for Dreyer, what could’ve been a breast-clutching melodrama is instead a meditation on aging and sacrifice.
328/365: Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
As a brand, Nolan has meant big, over-written sci-fi blockbusters, if that’s your jam — but this left-turn war epic is something else entirely, and might be the most radically structured high-budget Hollywood movie we’ve seen in decades — and certainly the riskiest, most adult big film released in the summer since at least 1992 (namely, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven). It is, simply, a massive recreation of war history that dared to defy the empathy-bonding mandate of Hollywood narrative filmmaking, with an architecture that intercuts a week-long story thread (soldiers on the beach) with a day-long thread (the father and son crossing the channel in their boat) with an hour-long thread (Tom Hardy’s bomber pilot) as if they were simultaneous, and expects us to parse it out amidst the film’s harrowing wartime violence. Not to mention, Nolan’s soldiers are just that — soldiers, lost, panicked, dying or not on the beach, and we’re not supposed to think that knowing their histories or even their names makes their trial less immediate. Terrence Malick’s miraculous The Thin Red Line did something similar in 1999, and both films insist on a crucial humanism that steps over the individual and embraces the universal. Watch Nolan’s on the biggest screen you can find, and loudly.
329/365: Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2002) (Vudu)
Somehow escaping tastelessness on its way to being a daring heartbreaker, Lee’s breakout film comes loaded with five Venice Film Festival awards, but remains underseen, even by Korean New Wave devotees. We follow Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu), a learning-disabled loser fresh from a prison stint for drunk-driving manslaughter, as he sets his sights on the crash victim’s daughter, Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a severely cerebral-palsied girl; his advances at first seem tantamount to attempted rape — a scene that challenges any viewer’s empathy — but which morph into tearjerking consensual sex that’s discovered by both of their outraged (but covertly amoral) families. Throughout, Lee’s handheld realism gives way to moments of matter-of-fact lyrical sorcery, most often when, as a wickedly unlikely romance blooms between these two misfits, Moon will suddenly relax her character’s harshly twisted deformity, spring out of her wheelchair, and dance, allowing us to see the distance between Moon’s lovely, vibrant self and her damn-the-torpedoes imitation of handicap, refocusing our gaze on the woman rather than the deformity. As he can do so beautifully, Lee effortlessly creates a dense social context for his star-crossed lovers, from the bookending sojourns to the unforgiving police station to one of the great, discomfiting extended-family dinner scenes of all time.
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, 45, 46
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.
