Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 36 — Your #1 Quarantine Couch Resource
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
This week, for your time-killing convenience, we’d like to reprise our choices of extraordinarily long films, all European as it happens— you may never again have quite as ripe an opportunity to catch up with these masterworks.
246/365: 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 but powerful drug.
247/365: 1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1977) (YouTube)
A twelve-course feast of a movie if there ever was one. In the early ‘70s Bertolucci had massive global hits with The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, and so he cashed in his cachet to make this over-5-hour national epic, which surveys pre-WWI Italian history like it was a world-sized painting come to thunderous life. Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu are an aristocrat and a bastard peasant, respectively, born simultaneously before the turn of the century (Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden are their fathers, respectively), and maturing together during the rise of Fascism. A little politically naive about Communism’s promise — or maybe Bertolucci was being ironic? — this seemingly limitless pageant is chockablock with masterful set-pieces and stunning travelling shots, scored heartachingly by Ennio Morricone, and photographed like a Mediterranean dream by Vittorio Storaro. Moviewatching as rapture.
248/365: Dekalog (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1989) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
At nearly 10 hours, comprised of ten interconnected films all set in the same dire Warsaw housing project during the last days of Communism, and each poised to entangle the confounding moral threads of a single one of the Ten Commandments, this brooding, spectral gargantua is not only Kieslowski’s masterpiece but probably the greatest Polish film ever made. Guilt, marriage, loyalty, faith, betrayal, family, social connectivities — it’s all tied into scary, haunting knots, calling the cards not only on universal human frailties but on the Communist Era’s failures and approaching denouement. One of the episodes, the one tackling “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” was even expanded by Kieslowski into a heart-stopping feature, but they all pulse and menace with significance and melancholy. That is, until film #10, which is a rueful kind of comedy.
249/365: Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
One of the planet’s great cinematic formalists, Hungarian master Tarr has a designated wedge of territory all to himself — apocalyptically run-down, dead-or-dying post-Communist villages on vast Mittleuropan plains of mud, poverty, crushed will, delusionary behavior and charcoal skies, all observed by a cinematographic point of view that stalks silently and patiently through the ruins like a ghost. Because it is first and foremost an experience, a seven-and-a-half-hour ordeal by shadow in which the passage of time upon the eyeballs is its reason for being, this monster of an art film stands as one of the late-century’s most formidable moviegoing experiences. It’s an epic trance state, a massive portrait of a withered universe; critics have noted that two-hour slices could stand as redoubtable films on their own. (Virtually any shot is a frameable work in its own right.) Set entirely in a rainy, desolate village fallen into inertia after the collapse of its collective farm, as well as on the surrounding flatland puszta, the film details the lives of the peasants as they await settlement money for the land — about which they are in a constant state of anxiety. Goldbricking is on everyone’s minds, particularly once it is rumored that a well-known grifter that everyone thought was dead is going to return — from the grave? — and, presumably, scam everyone out of their share in order to keep the dead dream of Communism going. Within this fraught structure, Tarr’s film wanders, dallies and watches, exhaustively, as the individuals worry and doomsay their way into one dead end after another — alcoholic ruin, cruelty, suicide, thievery, sodden despair, a plethora of scheming, paranoid human beasts playing out their final act in a Godless world.
250/365: Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980) (Criterion Channel)
This mastodon is no mere movie — at 15.5 hours long, it is a work that demands a revision in our method of watching, experiencing and assessing cinema, and becomes, eventually, about its own length. Adapting a 1929 novel by Alfred Doblin that has haunted Fassbinder his whole life, the manic New German Cinema giant made a near-endless briefing for a descent into hell, from an already hellish Weimar Germany, where women are bawling trash, men are lurking hyenas, and the world is a combustion engine run on souls. What happens is like the slo-mo footage of a fatal car wreck: Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht), a great, bullish, dim lug of a man, is released from a prison stint for manslaughter, and is thrust back into his old life of pimping and violence. The opening chapter is titled “The Punishment Begins”: from the start, it’s clear that Biberkopf is unhinging, and as the hours press on, and his struggle to stay honest and happy becomes truly hopeless, the film takes on the aura of a saintly tribulation.
251/365: Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime, Kanopy)
Bergman’s career summation and the kind of rich, timeless, cautionless magnum opus we can only receive, like benedictions, from artists who’ve paid their generation’s dues of sweat, risk, tears and honesty. An demi-autobiographical saga, this mega-movie views the oceanic heavings of a close-knit theater family circa 1907 from the perspective of the eponymous lad, from glowing Christmas memories through a medieval stepchildhood and, chillingly, profoundly, beyond. Sadly, only the 3+-hour version is available — it was reportedly the version Bergman liked best, but the 5+-hour edit, made for Swedish TV, is the shit.
252/365: The Red Riding Trilogy (Julian Jarrold, James Marsh & Anand Tucker, 2009) (Hulu, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Over five hours long all told, this tripartite British saga maybe the greatest film directed by three different people. Scanning something like a unified field theory of human darkness and modern social evil, splayed out in grueling, fascinating long form, the trilogy spans a full decade of fictional history in the nastiest chunk of “the North Riding” of Yorkshire, with dozens of characters, many of whom seem like neglectable supporting nobodies until they bloom later on as primary figures of malice or guilt or fermented secrets. It’s more than just a massive crime saga, trained on an entire society instead of a single killer or victim — it’s a web of mysteries, many not solvable, with a litany of corpses (sometimes little girls, sometimes teenagers, sometimes cops whacked by other cops) and fewer convenient answers than we’re usually comfortable with. Touching down in the northlands in 1974, then 1980, then 1983, each chapter ignited by serial killings but fueled beneath the surface by monstrous police corruption, with a cast including Andrew Garfield, Mark Addy, Sean Bean, Paddy Considine, Peter Mullan, Rebecca Hall, Eddie Marsan, David Morrissey, and scores of other familiar faces. That little is morally clear or easy is the point, of course. Even the Yorkshire accents leave words unarticulated — feel free to opt for subtitles, but even natives will lean forward in their seats, wondering what was just unsaid. Made for Brit TV (unsurprisingly) and praised by critic David Thomson as a rival to The Godfather films, it’s a masterpiece without an auteur — credit must be split between the directors, several producers, a single screenwriter and the original novels’ author.
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, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35
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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