Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 2
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
8/365: Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The self-knowing, ultra-topical, character-focused Brian De Palma movie everyone can agree on, this post-Watergate, post-Chappaquiddick conspiracy thriller plays as one of the Reagan-era’s freshest Hollywood expressions of ambivalence, full of movie-movie winks but still a seductive ride, beginning with the famous slasher-film-within-a-film, as we follow audio technician John Travolta as he slowly comes to understand that he accidentally recorded an assassination. For a fast, fun movie about cinema’s slippery struggle with verifiable truth and persistent fantasy it’s properly rich in mystery, with pieces of audio tape and celluloid coming to “mean” virtually anything — except what they literally represent. Beyond this tantalizing derma of Antonionian ingenuity, and given the unarguable pleasure of Travolta’s best and most convincing leading perf, De Palma often seems at times entirely sincere, and that makes the film still feel urgent and humane as well as ironic and clever, which is why, one suspects, it lingers in the brainpan long after many of his other films flare and then wither in the memory. The formal wit involved is substantial, as with one of De Palma’s most relaxed and eloquent set pieces, in sweet split-screen compositions: Travolta’s amiable recordist parsing out his night landscape via his shotgun mike and headphones, making his own mental movie up out of haphazard voyeurism, fauna capture, ambient atmospherics, and, eventually, the chance recording of an explosive accident.
9/365: Macbeth (Orson Welles, 1948) (Archive.org, YouTube)
Welles’s first Shakespearean launch is a Gothic-horror bad dream, shot on a spare set and with medieval compositions that owe as much to the silent Germans as to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Welles’s Bard films always used the plays as a kind of cultural anchor, to ground and dignify visual flourishes that wouldn’t seem out of place in the most hyperbolic noirs (a la Touch of Evil) or the Italian horror films of Mario Bava, and so the psychological drama is always de-emphasized in favor of visceral/emotional tumult. The mastery of seething textures and compositional assault is unmistakable, vividly connecting the tale’s moralistic thrust to the Christianized sense of sin and divine justice so prevalent in German Expressionism. Welles convinced the genre-stalwarts at Republic Pictures to bankroll this oddity, and its tight budget forced Welles to construct landscapes completely out of shadow. The resulting grunginess economically evokes the savagery and mythic chill of the Dark Ages better than any film made in Hollywood for decades, and the performances (all prerecorded, and all bearing erratic Scottish burrs) are less actory showboatings than muscular aspects of the landscape. Welles’s brooding Macbeth, interestingly enough, is limned as a narcissist muddled by drink, daydreams and powermad egomania, making him yet another Welles simulacra in the filmmaker’s autocritique gallery, beside Kane, Gregory Arkadin and Hank Quinlan.
10/365: Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg, 2010) (Criterion Channel, iTunes)
Exactly the sort of mysterious experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Malmberg’s portrait begins with context: the story of Mark Hogancamp, an upstate New York man who, in 2000, was beaten outside a bar by four men so badly he incurred brain injury, and woke up to a life he barely remembered. Slowly he discovered that he’d been an accomplished artist (the drawings we see are wild and Crumb-like), and that he’d been a raging, ruinous alcoholic. Seriously disabled mentally, Hogancamp reverted to a childhood impulse and began building a miniature town in his yard, occupied by action figures and simulating a WWII Belgian village filled with GIs, Nazis, Brits, vamps, brutes, barmaids, and simulacra of Hogancamp‘s friends, family and neighbors. Which is where both Hogancamp’s life and Malmberg’s film sprouts some very unlikely mushrooms: he began photographing the tableaux, and soon, someone realized that Hogancamp is an artist, a primitive born out of trauma. Malmberg holds this and other revelations for as long as he can, but he hits you immediately with Hogancamp’s perspective, never showing the titular mini-village in its depressing entirety but instead crawling through it with a short focal length and treating it like a movie set. Which is in many ways what it is — Hogancamp’s beautiful, arresting photos are so saturated with natural contrasts and filled with spontaneous feeling (somehow, dolls’ frozen expressions feel organic for him) that they suggest stills for a movie that doesn’t exist. Hogancamp’s project is undoubtedly a textbook example of outsider art, and enthralls for the genre’s particular reasons. But even without knowledge of the artist’s life, the photos’ use of toys steps beyond neo-kitsch into a realm where child-like transference merges with a dramatic grandeur that’s vintage Hollywood and genuine pathos both. Please ignore the Robert Zemeckis adaptation, Welcome to Marwen.
11/365: Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The closest a Hollywood movie has ever and will ever get to the free-associative shotgun spray of Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Spike Jonze’s and Charlie Kaufman’s first film is an ingenious, incredibly entertaining, Rorschach-blot meta-comedy that also has a dumpsterful of things to say about celebrity, movies, sexual identity, control, and much, much more. The primary metaphor, and that’s all we’re saying, is a mysterious, slimy subterranean tunnel that leads directly from a small door in an obsolete office building into the consciousness of an actor named John Malkovich; after 15 minutes in Malkovich’s head, however, you’re interdimensionally gobbed out onto the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike, but the orgasmic thrall of living inside his skull (and what we see is, not incidentally, less than thrilling) spurs the characters (unemployed puppeteer John Cusack, his frumpy wife Cameron Diaz, sultry biz-chick Catherine Keener) to repeat the experience and steer Malkovich’s actions into fulfilling their sexual fantasies. Plenty of sequences suggest a consciousness on a chemical ride: a pet chimpanzee flashing back to his own orphanhood in the jungle, Charlie Sheen showing up as a mutant version of himself blabbering on about “hot lesbian witches!”, and the climactic homicidal chase through Malkovich’s tortured subconscious, filled with crowds of doppelgangers.
12/365: The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman, 1975–79) (Amazon Prime, Ovid)
One of the most riveting and vital historical document ever put on celluloid, Patricio Guzman’s multi-part guerrilla epic about the rise of Salvador Allende’s socialist government and its subsequent usurpation by the country’s American-backed military junta remains a geyser of outrage, the detailed record of one of the world’s very few successful socialist administrations and its tragic decimation. Guzman and his team were free to film, but of course they were also free to be shot on the spot (Part 1 ends, famously, with soldiers aiming directly at the lens filming them and shooting down the man behind the camera), and to be arrested, tortured and killed later by Pinochet’s death squads, which is how Guzman’s main DP, Jorge Muller Silva, died. Over the course of almost five hours, the film scrupulously details every step in the political tangle, from Allende’s rise to the final blitzing, on September 11, 1973, of the presidential palace. That the CIA and the Pentagon were behind the insurrection may still be an arguable and semi-classified matter here, but virtually every laborer Guzman meets on the streets of Santiago in 1973 says as much, in no uncertain terms. Co-produced by Chris Marker, Guzman’s historic epic is discomfiting and scary, and stands as one of the perhaps dozen films every gradeschooler should see before they graduate and acquire the right to vote.
13/365: The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, 1964) (Easterneuropeanmovies.com)
A boisterous, Borgesian genre epic that has its wicked genre all to itself, this Polish classic is a collision of Chaucerian fable, Tarot imagery and stark, corpse-strewn, anamorphic landscapes, liming a Chinese-box-like tale beginning when two opposing Napoleonic-era soldiers sit down in the middle of a wartorn Spanish house to read a mysterious manuscript, which tells the tale of another officer’s journey cross-country to Madrid. His odyssey is perpetually frustrated by agents of evil and temptation (including Inquisition terrorists), who tell other stories, from which other stories creep. Casting nearly the entirety of 1960s Film Polski (including fated star Zbigniew Cybulski), Has even reaps from Melies and Griffith to evoke the movie’s yesteryear sense of superstitious angst. Among a dozen other things (including an elaborate ruse on narrative pleasure in general), Has’ extravaganza is an engaging dialogue between Christian anxiety and pagan zest — someone’s always bedding down with bosomy ghosts and waking up with carrion and crows. Larky, seductive and owed to by both Lars von Trier and Terry Gilliam, the film musters an utterly unique and antiquated cosmos, and it was Jerry Garcia’s favorite film.
14/365: La Vie de Boheme (Aki Kaurismaki, 1992) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
There have been earlier filmizations of the famous Henri Murger novel (including a 1926 Lillian Gish/King Vidor hand-wringer), and there’s Puccini’s opera, but at its core this wry, weepy, episodic gutter farce is a natural for irreverent Finn master Kaurismaki, not only for its deadpan, down-and-out humor but also because it offers an opportunity to fire potshots at the high-culture pantheon on which Murger sits. Carefully composed and timed for priceless deadpan reverb while also being quickly made, gritty, and garage-band inelegant, the doomed-romance fable is stationed in a Paris somewhere between Murger’s 1840 and early-‘90s commercialized metropolis, and the juxtaposition between Murger’s famed bohemia and late-20th-century Europe makes for the film’s easiest yocks; the three penniless protagonists (a composer, a painter, a playwright) are absurd anachronisms, epitomizing both the 19th century art hobo and Kaurismaki’s modern schmuck, as they labor at their dismal crafts, live meal to meal and pursue various curbside romances, one of which tragically faces death by way of terminal illness. With his trademarked pregnant pauses, unresponsive actors, stark compositions and shadowy mise-en-scene, Kaurismaki was once better than anyone at boiling down a scene’s inherent irony to its most fundamental form. (No one could do better by Kafka.) This relative epic is self-assured, self-conscious vaudeville, and as such happily indexes Kaurismaki’s movie lineage in the process: Sam Fuller, Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Leaud all make appearances.
Year Two Archive: Week 1
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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