Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 19
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
127/365: The Tin Drum (Volker Schlondorff, 1979) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
A spirited, lavish adaptation of Gunter Grass’ great postwar/postmodernist novel, daring to saunter, like its pint-sized anti-hero Oskar, between the knees and under the skirts of the Third Reich’s memory. The little megalomaniac is first met as a prenatal fetus (“impersonating a meat-colored baby,” as he puts it in the narration) and then, with a few years, in a post-toddler’s body that he, by sheer dint of self-destructive will, has halted in its growth. An impacted Peter Pan in a different kind of Neverland, Oskar ages but stays the same, moving forward with time but preserving the idealized past-slash-present (a succinct way to characterize right-wing desires), all the while venting non-stop spleen to himself about the foolishness, dishonesty and venality of the adult world as he sees it. As Oskar, 12-year-old David Bennent is an utterly uncanny film presence, someone we’d never seen on film before. A preternaturally small boy (though not dwarfist), Bennent resembled Oskar Werner compressed and Muppetized, with hostile eyes the size of dinner plates, and his feral, watchful performance is one of the strangest and most disarming among all children on film.
128/365: Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
Nippo-Gothic horror fables, from Ugetsu on down, have a long tradition of proto-feminist outrage — the metaphysical issue of the genre almost always revolves around rape and sexual vulnerability in a feudal landscape. Shindo’s film, his echoing follow-up to Onibaba, may take the cake — a throat-biting version of I Spit on Your Grave’s revenge action leaves a stream of samurai bodies behind, perpetrated by a mother/daughter-in-law pair of gang-raped corpses, incarnated as feline vampires. (Pre-evisceration, the mom’s ponytail flips like a stalking cat’s tail.) Western Gothic never dipped a toe in this demon pond, but Shindo muddies the water with the return of a fabled son, shanghaied into war and now a chieftain’s officer, who’s told to eliminate whatever is haunting Rashomon Gate at night and drinking gallons of man-blood. Shindo’s evocation of the central haunted bamboo grove is all night shadows and luminescent mist, even when we’re in the ghosts’ illusory house, which sometimes, via a deftly conceived double exposure, appears to glide through the dark forest on its own. But the mood doesn’t mitigate the tragic political pallor of the final, limb-hacking, back-flipping mother-son faceoff, which pits patriarchal might against aeons of angry women.
129/365: Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
This one-of-a-kind doc offers wide open road to the expansive transliterative microculture that has spored and proliferated in the last few decades around Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and it’s certainly the first feature film entirely about what another feature film might actually be about and probably isn’t. For most of us, one look at The Shining is enough to know that it’s a Rubik’s Cube with no final solution, a mystery maze with a hundred doors and no exit. But what if not? What the sultanic and secretive Kubrick may or may not have intended is, now that he’s dead, a great unknowable, but it’s certainly at the core of the questions that haunt the new film’s roster of amateur hyper-scholars, all of whom simply narrate (Ascher merely had them rant their theories into recorders, and then used Kubrick’s visuals to supplement). Is the film really about the Native American genocide? Or the Holocaust? Did Jack Torrance also actually exist somehow in the distant past? What’s with the bear costume? Is Kubrick admitting to have faked the Apollo moon landing? Are there really minotaurs everywhere? Why does the Dopey sticker disappear? Does the hotel’s floor plan make the hotel manager’s office impossible, and if so, what’s the point of that? It’s as though the conspiracists of Room 237 have turned The Shining into the Overlook itself, a haunted house with an infinite capacity for hidden realities. Of course, it doesn’t occur to anyone that Kubrick’s intentions may well have included deliberate ambiguities and mysteries that were meant to be appreciated for their opacity, not dissected for secrets that aren’t there. It’s perhaps best to regard the whole party as a fan mode of engagement that surpasses notions of auctorial purpose, genre study or thematic context, and therefore becomes just a cataract of zesty acts of creative fiction-making on its own. If it were a six-hour mini-series, we’d watch it twice.
130/365: A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996) (Vimeo)
A premier Iranian meta-film, with a fascinating backstory/context: in his 70s youth Makhmalbaf was a terrorist-activist who in battling the Shah’s forces knifed a young policeman and went to jail. Twenty-odd years later, the cop, now retired and wanting to be an actor, shows up at one of Makhmalbaf’s auditions, inspiring Makhmalbaf to make a film about the knifing and about the struggle to make such a film, with the real cop on set. We’re never sure how much we’re watching is rehearsed or spontaneous, but surely very little of it is scripted, as the ex-cop coaches the young actor chosen to play him (he wanted to play himself, despite his age), and as the actor chosen to play the young Makhmalbaf reveals that he, like the director, shares an idealistic bond with his cousin-girlfriend, who, when the daughter of Makhmalbaf’s real niece is forbidden from being in the film, gets cast as the young Makhmalbaf’s cousin-girlfriend, who helped him knife the cop. The Godardian knot only gets tighter when we realize that the cop thought the beautiful young girl who kept asking him the time was flirting with him, and that he’d fallen in love with her; his knifing prevented him from giving her a flower he had brought to work, and 20 years later he still regrets not giving it to her. Mahkmalbaf lets this extraordinary real-life web unfurl all on its own, without exposition, and the tumble of cross-purposes is often heart-rending and always funny. (They’re always talking about the movie they’ll make, though they must be quite aware that they’re in it already.) Simple yet layered like an onion, sweet and practically perfect.
131/365: The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) (Dailymotion, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Archive.org)
Arabian Nights lite, with characters as broad as circus tent, this Douglas Fairbanks silent is a fuming cataract of imagism, of design psychopathia, of Espresso Expressionism. Every shot of the film, whose true auteur is most probably set-design maestro William Cameron Menzies, is a daydream you don’t want to wake from. It’s an eyeball banquet, equal parts Deco, Nouveau, Gothic, Naive, Byzantine and Aestheticist, fairy-tale graphics and Victorian-Asian motifs, Mucha arabesques and Beardsley curlicues, Orientalist cliches and Casbah clutter, Kay Nielsen three-dimension-alized and Hollywood itself (plus Grauman’s Chinese Theater and Alla Nazimova’s Garden of Allah mansion but times a bajillion) compressed into a trompe l’oeil fresco. When the closed gates of Bagdad are suddenly guarded, at night, by two chained tigers that emerge from hatches in the ground, it’s like you’ve succumbed to an opium stupor in the naked lap of Nita Naldi herself. Why it strikes us as so gorgeous is a question worth asking — what it might come down to is another way in which our inarticulate response to film experience interfaces yet again with childhood experience, childhood memories, childhood casts of mind. Bask in the visual assault or go elsewhere.
132/365: Hana-Bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1997) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Having started out as a laconic comedian — a kind of Japanese Steven Wright — Kitano toggled over into making drolly violent crime films, filled with mysterious silences, deadpan cutaways, leapfrogging narrative hijinks, blank-faced comedy and lizard-quick explosions of believable bloodshed. This may be his most perfectly realized movie, an introverted heist drama in which the carnage is over before we know it, and the crime is incidental to the awkward in-between moments Kitano trains his camera on, often from a strange distance. He stars as a silent ex-cop with a terminal wife, an unwieldy code of honor and the battle-ready temper of a mad dog, who decides to rob a bank, but plot synopsis straitjackets what is organic, freeflowing and offbeat about Kitano’s films, each of which could be a lesson for young filmmakers in how to express action and tension with a minimum of pyrotechnics and incident. Every shot counts, what you don’t see is at least as crucial as what you do, and laughs and gasps are both mustered through simple, concise editing and genuinely surprising in-frame action.
133/365: The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel, 2008) (Amazon Prime)
A wily Argentine who might be the world’s greatest female filmmaker, Martel crafts uneasy, unresolved movies that perform surgery on our expectations as well as on the comfortable, well-pickled Argentine bourgeoisie she apparently know so well. This film begins at a simple afternoon outing, mothers and kids and cars — but right away, the framing and cutting and layered busy-ness suggest an imbalance, a lack of seeing clearly, an impending catastrophe; we’re not being fed expository information, but instead observing the smug, shallow, utterly real nouveau riche as they walk some kind of precipice… Something’s going to happen, and it won’t be good. When it does, we’re still not sure what it is — Vero (Maria Onetto), an aging bleach-blond wife and mother, runs over something on the way home. But does she? She’s not sure, either, but whatever happened it cut her loose from her privileged moorings. She stalks back into her life in a dumbfounded daze — is she amnesiac? does she remember the husband, the kids, the old boyfriend who seduces her? — and her discombobulation is so complete that her sleepwalk through rampaging affluence, where everyone is solicitous to her, becomes for us not only an existential dynamic but a political one as well. (Vero’s privileged, SUV-driving tribe is, of course, a tiny demographic in South America, surrounded by oceans of poverty.) Chopping up time and launching into traveling shots that imply wicked narrative torque but which are, finally, enigmatic, Martel’s film coalesces into a haunting, beautiful puzzle.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
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
Keep up with Smashcut 365 by following Smashcut on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
What is Smashcut?
Smashcut is a next generation learning platform built for real time, media-based education. Smashcut partners with universities and organizations to develop and deliver customized, branded, media-based online programs. The Smashcut platform features a high degree of collaborative instruction, and real-time student project review via live 1:1 video sessions with instructors. We built Smashcut to help the next generation of students learn to communicate ideas and work effectively in a culture and workplace increasingly dependent on visual media and digital collaboration. Learn more at Smashcut.com.
