Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 51
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
352/365: The Night of the Shooting Stars (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1982) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
A distinctive force in European cinema since the late ’60s, the Taviani brothers peaked with this WWII peasant epic, arguably the best Italian film of its decade. The narrative is an extrapolation of a real incident, in which a town’s-worth of villagers were massacred by the Nazis — but in the brothers’ reimagining, a small mob of the peasants, following a laconic patriarch (Omero Antonutti), escape and set out on foot in the middle of the night, in search of the American forces. The eyes through which we witness this anti-Odysseyean journey belong to an impetuous, prankster six-year-old in a print dress, and so the story itself is imbued with a child-like lyricism and irreverence: death comes and goes without much ado, hiding in the forest with 30 adults feels like nothing so much as a great game, and every disruption of the ordinary is a bolt of magical living. The Tavianis’ details accumulate like special knowledge: the villagers shielding their ears as they leave against the pleading barks of their own dogs, left behind; the way the procession walks, arm in arm and chatting and free in the sunshine; a dying girl’s daydream of meeting Sicilian soldiers from Brooklyn; the way the villagers all sleep jumbled in a bomb crater, like mass grave victims waking up and stretching. This poetry crests in the film’s climactic passage, a great, ironic battle of guns and pitchforks with Black Shirts in a vast wheat field, where no one knows who precisely the enemy is until they meet on their knees, nose to nose. “Even true stories can end well,” someone says, despite heavy tragedy and scores of corpses, and so the Tavianis make their case, with an unimpeachable observational style and sense of the gritty absurd.
353/365: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Karel Zeman, 1961) (Criterion Channel)
A certain kind of premium cinematic ambrosia certain movie junkies will step over their mothers for, this classic and heretofore badly preserved Czech fantasy emerges from a 4K restoration like an antique-shop daydream. Zeman was a dedicated mythmaker and fairy-tale architect, thriving in the proud, state-supported Czech puppet/animation film subindustry through a mid-century career more or less completely detached from the pressures of Communist culture. He was blessed with a rich design eye, an ceaseless appetite for folk imagery, an impetuous sense of visual humor, and an inventor’s curiosity for building impossible machines, and his version of Rudolph Erich Raspe’s 18th-century tall tales remains definitive. Zeman’s vision here, untroubled by politics or history, begins with proto-astronauts on the Moon, and handily ropes in 19th as well as 18th iconography, by way of using Gustav Dore’s 1862 etchings as reference. In fact, Dore’s art, as well as a myriad of other illustrative images from the 1800s, is sometimes self-consciously used as as super-imposed sets; the real sets were likewise dressed as giant Dore etchings, with palace interiors covered with hatchwork, Caligari by way of Mother Goose. That scratches the surface, as Zeman, the most joyous heir to Melies, piles on layers of Byzantine imagery, animates vultures and rocketships and flying cannoballs, and mixes in piecemeal stock footage (ice floes, moon craters, bat swarms), as the Baron recounts preposterous tales that run, as in Carroll’s Alice tales, in a meandering fashion more in love with pretend-play than narrative progression. It’s an injection of pure movie heroin, and the only problem with it is that it’s not 185 minutes instead of 85 minutes. Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson would not be who they are without it.
354/365: Radio On (Christopher Petit, 1979) (YouTube)
Film critic Christopher Petit’s 1979 debut film is a quintessential seize-the-zeitgeist movie, an spare indie that freeze-dries England on the dusk of the punk era without seeming to try very hard. (And does it at a time when British cinema was all but completely moribund.) Supported only by a nominal narrative, the movie is really a mood piece, viewing the British landscape with a gimlet eye and finding solace only in postpunk pop singles, which structure the movie’s soundtrack: David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Devo, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury, etc., always heard on LPs, cassettes or radio play, accompanying a disaffected road trip, with DP Martin Schafer’s saturnine black-&-white compositions of industrial waste, semi-rural nowheresville, urban disconnectedness and late-capitalist angst stating Petit’s position better than any narrative could. As it is, the story is palm-sized — a numb and introverted DJ (David Beames) drives in his old coup to Bristol to look into his brother’s mysterious suicide. Of course, he discovers nothing, except England itself along the way, home to lost immigrants, political fugitives, hustlers, dispirited laborers, and punks with nowhere to go. (As a service-station attendant still mourning the death of Eddie Cochrane, Sting makes his first film appearance.) What Petit’s film gets at is a little difficult to articulate — a mournful portrait of national anomie, a trapped-in-amber windshield view of a conflicted, self-esteem-challenged country in economic decline.
355/365: The Day I Became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, 2000) (Vimeo)
The first film from Mrs. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, this startlingly simple and ravishing Iranian debut is a linking series of symbolist fables that suggests the lyricism of Vigo, Bunuel and Paradjanov while standing its own primitive ground in the wasteland that is Islamic society for women. Because only feature films need to get approved by the government, Meshkini shot her film as three shorts, and in synopsis, it can sound schematic: the three tales focus on womanhood in crisis, first as a child emerging into the strictures of adult life, second as a grown woman struggling for freedom, and third as an elderly woman facing death. First, a young girl begs to have one last hour to play with her friend on the beach before she must wear her first chador and thereafter have no improper contact with boys (she spends much of the time waiting for her friend, standing a stick in the dirt to see its shadow, and her liberty, gradually vanish). Second, a man furiously rides across the desert and intersects with… a huge marathon bicycle race peopled entirely by hundreds of women wrapped in their pitch-black chadors (an unsettling and odd image that never grows ordinary), to find his restless wife racing and divorce her in transit. Lastly, an elderly woman arrives by plane at a huge duty-free mall and buys an entire home’s worth of furniture and appliances, only to have a herd of young boys deposit it all on a beach, creating a surreal parody of materialist achievement. The entire film is dominated by symbolism so bold and lithe and lovely you have to be made of stone to resist it. A big winner at Venice.
356/365: The City without Jews (H.K. Breslauer, 1924) (YouTube, Archive.org)
A cultural fossil that suggests a breed of sardonic sauropod where we had only supposed there were bacterium, this silent is, simply put, a satirical dystopia railing against anti-Semitism that just happens to prophesize the rise of European national socialism a few years later. Austrian-made, so therefore even odder (Vienna barely had a film industry in the silent era, and adept Austrians, like Lang and Pabst, would emigrate to Germany), this ideological whatzit posits a Mitteleuropan Republic of Utopia where rising economic woes encourages the populace and politicians to expel the Jewish population. Thereafter, the society (particularly its banks and theaters) begins to collapse, thereby allowing the movie to cut itself with the double-bladed action of skewering bigotry and unintentionally agreeing with its tenets. The Rorschach effect is dizzying — images of marching refugees are mated with anti-goyische farce, and you can’t help but suspect that however well-intentioned the scenario represents a secret cultural wish. Then, we get to sunny, peaceful Zion. A relatively artless film that repeats its own footage liberally, Breslauer’s movie has the ironic air of an I.B. Singer parable. But dread was in the air — the film outraged the National Socialists, and Hugo Bettauer, the prolific Jewish author of the bestselling novel and screenplay, was murdered by a young Nazi a year after the film’s premiere. His co-scenarist, Ida Jenbach, died in a concentration camp. Quite probably an absolutely unique blip in film history, it’s a righteous but unassuming movie that scans now like a Nostradamus-ian prevision made to seem almost harmless by the magnitude of history.
357/365: The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet, 1971) (Vudu, YouTube)
Drifting around in the backroad dustclouds of the American New Wave were a slew of genre roadsters entirely benefitting from the era’s textural ideas and ultrarealism, and Sidney Lumet’s early heist thriller is a prime example. Imagine: this is what big-budget, star-packed “blockbuster” Hollywood films once looked and smelled like. Buttressed by a prophetic Nixon-era surveillance motif carried over from Lawrence Sanders’s novel and almost entirely incidental to the plot, the movie tracks career crook Sean Connery (sans toupee) as he gets paroled from the big house and instantly decides to rob an entire posh apartment building on the Upper East Side. The realism carries over to the compromises he must make in getting funding from the mob (Alan King), and in the melange of ex-cons (pink poof Martin Balsam, why-not techie-kid Christopher Walken, ghetto wiseacre Dick Williams) he recruits and sometimes regrets recruiting. There’s no banter, just the job, which of course goes horribly wrong (in the pre-Reagan century, heist movies were demonstrations of greed’s tragedy, not the triumph of amoral rogues). But Lumet was fine-tuning what would soon become one of the best New York eyes in the business, and the rhythms of the crime as it unfolds (and refolds, in flashbacks) is breathlessly seductive. Once the cops close in (again, quietly), and Connery & Co. begin padding around the carpeted hallways in a swelling panic, tensions rise as they never do in the Oceans films. Plus, the casting (Ralph Meeker as police chief, Garret Morris as a beat cop reluctantly roped into SWAT-like acrobatics, Max Showalter as an Ed Koch mayor before Ed Koch) is prime.
358/365: Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) (Hulu, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, HBO Go)
An atom-powered, magical-realist fantasia, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film broke all sorts of French box-office records, and splashed here as French films rarely do anymore, and it’s easy to see why: it reeks charm and spirit like perspiration on a jogger. It’s all about the loves and odd metaphysics of a young, shy Parisian waitress (Audrey Tatou, thereafter a star), who witnesses coincidences everywhere and whose existence is an avalanche of serendipity, eccentricity, voyeurism, cosmic retribution, Rube Goldberg machinations, and, most vitally, romance sought, lost and found. When Amelie first spots her object of desire, Jeunet has her heart visibly glow beneath her blouse; when heartbroken, she digitally melts into a puddle. Connections are made by way of discarded photo-booth headshots, kidnapped garden gnomes, booby-trapped apartments, living park statues, etc.; it’s a movie universe shaped by voodoo confluences and raw affection, and the barely contained joy evoked by star Audrey Tatou’s many sidelong glances to the camera, usually in reaction to a too-beautiful-to-believe coincidence, is irresistible.
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, 47, 48, 49, 50
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