Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 11
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
71/365: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
A ragged bullet wound in the ’70s American psyche, this legendary film was Scorsese’s first hit (and his last for many years), a dire, dreary, claustrophobic character study of a homicidal misfit (Robert De Niro, manifesting the empty interior of this man so perfectly his name — Travis Bickle — quickly became a part of the American vocabulary), that leads harrowingly to a vigilante massacre. Written by Paul Schrader, the film is faithful to the scumbucket-ness of New York in the ’70s like no other, just as Scorsese here reinvented how realistically movies can depict violence — as sudden, unpredictable whiplash moments that are fearsomely terrifying. Ambiguous and haunted, the movie came at a time when urban crime was common but mass public shootings were rare. It’s part of our common reality by now, something Joker can hardly ever hope to be.
72/365: The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2013) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Call this meta-giallo, a retro-neo take on the hoary old Italian slasher films of the ’70s, but with a firehose of ironic style, paintbox flourishes and slivered reflections and Art Nouveau designs and stop-motion still montages, edited together in a rambunctious associative flow that doesn’t tell a story so much as arterially spray one across a sumptuously papered wall. It can play like five Dario Argento movies spliced together into a dreamy music video epic, and it’s almost all supercool surface. A man returning from a business trip (Klaus Tange) arrives at his impossibly swanky Nouveau apartment to find the door locked from the inside and his wife missing. That he searches for her within the very strange building he lives in, and enlists a detective (Jean-Michel Vovk) to help him, are just about the only things we can say “happen” for sure — the details of his struggle, of the voyeuristic-paranoid stories told to him by others, the identities of various (naked, desired, homicidal, murdered) women we see, the sequence of surreal events, are all scrambled into a hallucinated stew that’s either the protagonist’s fracturing consciousness or the filmmakers’ zesty postmod gameplaying or both. Once Tange’s hero begins appearing to himself, over and over again, as interlopers who must be knifed in the shadows, and thereafter crawls behind the walls and under his own skin, to eviscerate himself from the inside out, you don’t search for a diegetic anchor to hold on to. In the end we’re left with the clear nod that the film could be considered a wry art-installment-essay on modern anxieties, not an attempt at expressing them. More’s the better.
73/365: Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1916) (YouTube)
Challenging D.W. Griffith as an aboriginal grandfather of movie storytelling, Feuillade made multi-episode crime serials bursting with ideas, secrets, betrayals, visual depth, and iconic imagery, and although they’re adorably ancient, they also feel strangely modern. This decidedly weird, convoluted seven-hour thriller — about a Parisian underworld gang called The Vampires and their devoted lawman adversaries — is a dizzying trip of hidden doors, fake limps, rooftop stalkings, and crafty skullduggery, and it’s no surprise the original Surrealists worshiped it. Musidora plays Vampire ringleader Irma Vep, Paris plays an empty Chinese-box version of itself, and narrative logic is taffy-twisted into a sense of moviegoing levitation. Try to watch it in only two or three chunks; it’s like a soft drug.
74/365: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Paradjanov, 1964) (Amazon Prime)
One of the most hermetic and completely original artists in cinema history, Paradjanov was a devoted folklorist, and his films do not resemble those made anywhere else, by anyone. It’s not too much to say that no effort at understanding the outer reaches of filmic sorcery can be complete without a confrontation with Paradjanov’s world, a timeless meta-past of living icons, bristling fairy tale tableaux, stylistic extremities, and retroactive culture shock. He was Georgian-Armenian by birth, cursed by fate to make films within a Soviet system that outlawed ancient culture and condemned him as a decadent (he was an uncloseted gay man) and a “surrealist.” He spent time in the gulag (released thanks to international outcry, in 1978), but the Politburo wasn’t entirely wrong; Paradjanov was dedicated to recreating the primitive pre-Soviet world as it might’ve been dreamt of in the opium-befogged skull of Omar Khayyam. There could hardly have been a more thorough, more defiant reply to Socialist Realism. This, his first and most orthodox film, is also the most visually dynamic; unfolding a tribal tale of star-crossed love and familial vengeance in the Carpathian mountains, the movie is one of the most restless and explosive pieces of camerawork from the so-called Art Film era, shot in authentic outlands with distorting lenses and superhuman capacity, and imbued with a grainy, primal grit. (A seemingly handheld P.O.V. shot from the top of a falling tree in a crowded, snowy forest is just the first of many breath-catchers.) Watching it is less like experiencing a form of entertainment-art than time travel, and afterwards you feel you know something about Ukranian tribal existence — its primitiveness, its music, its relationship with the terrain, its fear of magic — you couldn’t learn from a book.
75/365: Night Catches Us (Tanya Hamilton, 2010) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
What happened to Tanya Hamilton? In this day of diverse hiring in Hollywood, she’s been relegated to episodic TV since this startling debut, which plunges into a heretofore unexplored milieu: the interpersonal fallout in the ’70s after the rise of the Black Panther movement and after J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operation left so many of its members dead or in jail. Hamilton’s movie is decidedly retrospective, plopping down in the overgrown, affluent black neighborhood of Germantown, Philadelphia in 1976 where the matter of Pantherhood is something not openly discussed, where a new generation of youth begin their rebellions against the white police brutality still ever-present, and where the Panther legacy has been reduced to old photos, fading copies of the Party’s newspapers, and family secrets. The thrust is elegiac and rueful, the houses still have bulletholes in the walls (wallpapered over), and the rooms still remember the assassinations and betrayals, even as Jimmy Carter is heard on nearly every radio, begging for order and peace. We arrive with the return of Marcus (Anthony Mackie), duffel bag on his shoulder, after an unexplained self-imposed exile, on the occasion of his father’s funeral. Because of his absence, he’s widely suspected as an informant and therefore responsible for the police killing of a Party leader, whose widow Patricia (Kerry Washington) clings to the old neighborhood and tries to nurture the new wave of kids growing up in the Party’s wake. Soon the threats from the Panther underground begin, and the navigation of the old feelings and the new tensions on every street corner is agitated for the two of them by Patricia’s nine-year-old daughter (Jamara Griffin), who’s intent on finding out what happened to her father, and whose watchful gaze gives the movie a haunting gravity. In fact, Hamilton structures her whole film around wary watchfulness, and so her casting of Mackey and Washington is money in the bank. It’s a rich, mysterious piece of work, all the more fascinating because the sociopolitical territory it explores is brand new to movies.
76/365: The Isle (Kim Ki-Duk, 2000) (YouTube, Google Play)
An affront of a movie, but also a gorgeously photographed, restrained parable set entirely upon the surface of a placid, fog-layered lake, this no-prisoners-taken Korean import was instantly notorious for festival screenings rife with walkouts, fainting swoons (including film critics), and vomiting throes from here to the Venice Film Festival. The thing is, most of what’s appalling about Kim’s film is suggested, not shown; it’s refreshing to see that audiences are still vulnerable enough to lose their consciousness or their lunch thanks to a film, but thanks to what a film doesn’t show? That’s entertainment! It’s not horror, but that doesn’t mean another label will fit — psychosexual existentialism. The lake in question is something of a defunct Asian particularity — a floating resort-cum-hideaway, where lovers, fisherman and carousers can hole up for weeks at a time upon tented rafts, their food, booze and hookers boated out to them by the local proprietress (the ghostly Jung Suh). This mute, raven-haired wraith is the scariest mystery — no clues are dropped as to who she is, why she doesn’t speak, or what has brought her to this station, where she sells herself for gangbangs on one hand and exacts cold-blooded, shark-like revenge upon short-changing customers on the other. She’s a fabulous, haunting creation, never hesitating to simply disappear into the night water and then rise up through a raft’s craphole to prove a point with an icepick. Of course, things only get murkier with the appearance of a depressed man (Kim Yoosuk, the cast name of the decade) determined to kill himself on the lake for undisclosed reasons. The pair of loners share a mutual fascination, but their pas de deux escalates into a grisly duel of masochism and comeuppance, and the first sequence to set off viewer-reactive sirens turns out to be a galloping motif: the man despairingly swallows a clump of handmade fish hooks, leaving the woman to hide him from the police under his raft and then matter-of-factly reel him back in again.
77/365: Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The meanest, leanest and most mysterious of the semi-recent British crime movies. Screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto have carved out a distinctive corner of the world here, and Glazer brings it to brilliant life: we open in a posh Spanish villa, where Gal (Ray Winstone), a relaxed, porcine ex-crook lives with his gorgeous ex-porn queen wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman), basking in no man’s paradise of white linen, white lawn furniture and white alabaster. Then one day, word comes of the arrival of Logan (Ben Kingsley), who’s on a mission to recruit Gal for a job back in London, and won’t take no for an answer. Most of the film takes places in and around Gal’s house as Logan hectors, insults, threatens, menaces, pummels and coerces Gal into re-entering the crime life, a question to which Gal has only an unswerving — but fearfully compliant — no. The casting is all here: the bulky Winstone, so terrifying elsewhere, is dwarfed by the threat of Kingsley, who uses his distinctive weirdness and hostile distance to awesome effect. One of the best things about Sexy Beast is what’s unsaid and understood: Logan marches right in and does the unspeakable, and we don’t need to be told what he’s capable of, or what everyone else has already experienced with him, because we see it in their eyes. In the last third, Sexy Beast takes a few left turns and narrative leap-froggings, and though the absence of Kingsley’s vial-of-nitro is felt, Glazer’s movie (his first) still pays off in spades. Confident, mature, deeply conceived and convincingly inhabited, it’s a surprisingly humane film — despite the close-range shotgun spray.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Year One 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, 51, 52
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