Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 23: New Year’s Resolution Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
155/365: Less Franchise Junkfood! — Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
About as perfectly written, directed and acted an adult drama can be in the 21st century, this hyperliterate, morally fraught, bristlingly tense ripper follows George Clooney’s desolate disaster-remediation “fixer”-lawyer into an ethical shitstorm surrounding a mentally dissolving colleague (Tom Wilkinson), chemical-company crimes, and an ambitious corporate shyster (Tilda Swinton) ready to put herself on the line. Gilroy blasted the ceiling into outer space on this one, and although Swinton won an Oscar, Clooney should have, too.
156/365: More High-Protein Imported Films! — Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988) (Vizolla, Amazon Prime)
One of the last great red-hot monumentalists, Greek master Angelopoulos was as much a world-builder as he was a Promethean image-maker — in order to stop your heart, he would move mountains, flood towns, orchestrate entire cities. Few other filmmakers ever dared to employ such elaborate mise-en-scene, but fewer still used the aesthetic to express overwhelming ideas about nationhood, justice and mass consciousness. It was with this amazing film that the full force of what Angelopoulos was capable of became apparent to world audiences. For many not only the greatest European film of the 1980s but also a redefinition of the art film as an ordeal by sympathy, monolithic visions, and effortless metaphoric torque, the movie follows a runaway brother and sister traversing the Balkan outlands looking for the father they’ll never find. From the giant statue’s hand rising from the sea to the catatonic huddle on a snow-shrouded highway, any single scene could change your life, or at least what you expect from cinema; a single, lengthy shot of a parked truck, while catastrophically upsetting, might also be the sharpest critique of viewer omnipotence ever created.
157/365: More Hitchcock! — The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
However familiar, lionized and otherwise dismissed as a genre goof, this famous hit remains the over-discussed filmmaker’s strangest, most consciously surrealist film — indeed, the most deeply irrational film ever made by a Hollywood studio. The nature-gone-berserk scenario, now a pop-cult reflex, is still remarkable for having no reasonable foundation, so the extraordinarily evocative set pieces — the bird-covered jungle gym, the attack on the phone booth, the torrent of birds pouring in through the fireplace, the final world-of-perched-birds apocalypse — suggest less an exercise in terror/suspense than a nervous, dreamy dose of Hollywood Dada. Hitchcock has always been greater for his moments of madness and passion than for his lauded machine-like ingenuity, and this must-see feels for all of its elaborate contrivance like a subconscious cry of dread. Moreover, Hitch’s infamous tricks — the discombobulating process shots, the lurking soundtrack, the editing flourishes like the three still shots of Tippi Hedren’s alarmed kisser as she watches the gas station explode — aren’t effective narrative tools at all, they’re creepy, stylized visions of a reality jacked into a disoriented panic. Along with Vertigo, The Birds may be mainstream American film’s most fascinating psychotic episode.
158/365: More and Better Documentaries from When Documentaries Cost Blood, Sweat and Tears! — Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Documentary-as-lifestyle filmmaking, evolving organically as a result of the merging of, or collision between, the filmmaker’s personality and the real world, and *not* a slick-&-quick archive-footage mashup concocted on a laptop, this insidious piece of non-fiction follows Werner Herzog’s attempts to film Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle. That film is the story of a turn-of-the-century Irish impresario (Klaus Kinski) who, in order to access a secluded jungle territory, and bring opera to the Amazon, has natives push a steamship over a mountain, from one river to another. It’s true — except in real life, the ship only weighed 30 tons, and was disassembled and reassembled in the process. Because Herzog is Herzog, the film’s ship is 300 tons, and is hauled over the mountain in one piece, using only turn-of-the-century tools. For Herzog, the real-world spectacle of performing the impossible in the wildest place on Earth wasn’t merely a means to an end; it was the entire reason to make a film. Special effects of any kind were not even considered. The good news for Blank was that it was a spectacularly troubled production, between crew injuries, plane crashes, cast changes, the possibly psychotic presence of Kinski, the semi-permanent state of war of the local tribes (stray arrow wounds were common), a tension-heightening border dispute between Peru and Ecuador, drought, malaria, murder threats, and, let’s face it, the circumstances produced by Herzog’s outrageous production scenario, which terrified the locals and injured untold workers. Throughout it all, Herzog stands like a thin tree in a hurricane, pushing forward long after an ordinary film production would’ve shut down, and defying astronomical odds and huge social forces and nature itself. The ordeal would take almost four years, and Blank crafts it into a resoundingly Herzogian epic that’s not unlike Fitzcarraldo itself — in fact, the two films are two sides of a diptych, both portraying two slightly insane megalomaniacal men determined to bulldoze into the precivilized wilderness and push a giant ship over a mountain for reasons that, even to them, remain unclear.
159/365: More Auteurs You’ve Never Heard Of! — Khrustalyov, My Car! (Alexei German, 1998) (Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube)
German was a recalcitrant St. Petersburg badass who managed to make only six movies in a 46-year career that traded enraged spittle with every manner of Soviet and post-Soviet authority entity. His films focus on the chaotic, cramped and bankrupt fringes of Soviet (particularly Stalinist) life, each conjuring a Russian universe in black-&-white imagery so densely layered and richly composed that each and every shot has the immersive, graphic resonance of a fully three-dimensional dream, frantic with ambivalence, character cross-purposes, war scars, uneasy communal hives, and the poisonous paradigms of Kafka-ish 20th-century totalitarianism. This film, his second to last, is by any measure a monster, absurdist to the point of derangement and inhabited like an overcrowded madhouse. The more context you get the better: the setting is a bustling snow-packed village in 1953, where the anti-Jewish purges are ongoing, and where a rapacious bulldozer of a drunken Red Army general (Yuri Tsurilo) becomes somehow marked for a purge and destined for torture and gulag exile but eventually ends up at Stalin’s deathbed, making the expiring dictator fart. Plot is not the point; indeed, Khrustalyov feels like a movie that has eight or ten other movies living inside of it, German’s frame allowing us a limited corridor of access to what is, after all, a superabundance of human goings-on — secret police, psychotic functionaries, dancing soldiers, doppelgangers, asylum castoffs, skiing tourists, village grovelers, ad infinitum, always packed into cluttered apartments and seen through humid windows, as German’s camera plummets after them down halls, from room to room to room, and into darkness. Unsurprisingly almost any description of German’s film fails — it’s a vision that captures the entire psycho ward of Stalin’s USSR in its very form and voice.
160/365: More Silent Masterpieces! — La Roue (Abel Gance, 1923) (Vimeo, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Epic-creator that Gance was, it’s stunning to consider that La Roue, the official running time of which clocks in at over five hours, wasn’t his biggest cinematic project (that’d be, famously, Napoleon four years later). Gance’s best films can play like a mad scientist’s laboratory at full crank, filthy with inexplicable angles, double exposures, impossibly moving cameras, crazed speed montages, etc., and this massive, tragic melodrama is something of a high-gear modernist landmark. (The current edition runs 4.5 hours, which since the film was butchered down to modest sizes wherever it went, is as long as it’s been seen anywhere since 1923.) The milieu, which Gance felt possessed a titanic symbolic vitality, is the railroad yards and workers’ habitats of early century France, framing a simple story: a trainwreck-orphaned girl is taken in by a gruff rail worker and grows into a luminous beauty, and nearly everyone falls in love with her — including, tortuously, her stepfather and her violin-making stepbrother, whom she thinks are her birth family. But Gance packs in enough narrative and moral agony and mad poetry for three Greek plays, stretching the timeframe out to years and ending up, for real, on the snowy cliff-edges of Mont Blanc. For all of Gance’s heedless image-making and Herzogian risks (Gance never took the easy way out when he could instead place the camera where a train might obliterate it or a cast member might fall into an Alpine ravine), the physical-visual torrent is almost overshadowed by the presence, as the rail worker, of Severin-Mars, a grandstanding legend in his day with an unforgettable face like a saddened, demon-eyed stallion.
161/365: Less Waiting 5 or 10 Hours for a Binged TV Show to Pay Off! — Street of Crocodiles (Timothy & Stephen Quay, 1986) (Amazon Prime, TotalShortFilms.com, Fandor)
For some devotees’ money the greatest short film ever made, and almost certainly the most inexhaustible 20 minutes of film you’ll see any time soon, this ferociously enigmatic stop-motion animation by the Quays is an immersion into a decaying world: the ubiquitous decrepitude and proto-totalitarian menace, the Bruno Schulz-ian characterization of Old Eastern Europe as a moth-eaten stage for existentialist dread, the rusty, perambulating screws and gears, the multi-planed images and bottomless shadows, the amber-mud hues, the pointless contraptions performing rote activities on the verge of entropic breakdown, the spindly, shabbily suited puppet-protagonist stalking through the soft machinery of a psychic warehouse in a startled state of paranoid anxiety. The Quays’ camera seems to be on a perpetual hunt for tableaux and textures that pierce the skin of an ancestral unconscious bruised by failure and fear — at one point, and quite incidentally, one among many screws busy unthreading themselves from the floor suddenly pauses and rotates the other way, back into the floor, for a moment, as if it’s unsure of where it’s going, unsure of freedom and purpose. Watching this hypnotic masterpiece of spooky dolls and covert meanings is like an invitation into a secret society, and could change your life.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
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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