Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 41— Quarantine Week 8
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
281/365: Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992) (Tubi, Amazon Prime)
Maddin, the world’s premier mad-doctor retro-ironist, began by reimagining early sound films of various heritages as demented stews of stilted absurdity and uproarious mock-Grimm storylines. This masterpiece, his third feature, is akin to a floridly colored incarnation of the German “mountain” films of the ’20s, scrambled with Johanna Spyri and Bruno Schulz, and whipped into a Freudian whirlpool. The setting is an Alpine village (mustered out of papier-mache, forced perspective and blinding light in a Canadian warehouse) where the slightest sound can inspire an avalanche. (Even the animals’ vocal cords are cut; in one scene we glimpse a dog soundlessly barking.) The narrator warns the denizens (“Careful! Careful!”) that every noise, as well as every impulse to behave improprietously, must be hushed. Naturally, the town reveals itself to be a hotbed of repressed impulses, and its Candyland cheeriness is soon tainted by jealousy, incest, suicide and murder. Maddin’s distinctive archness and cardboard-expressionist style are at the same time hilarious, gorgeous and profoundly unsettling, and for cinephiles this beaut is also a feast of sophisticated inside jokes and textual allusions. One of a kind, even in Maddin’s bewitching oeuvre.
282/365: Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, 2000) (iTunes)
This cinephiliac lark is at first blush a simple conceit, a remarkably silly film-history what-if, a semi-serious comedy built upon a long-conjectured fantasy. Which is: that the mysterious Max Schreck, star of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu was in fact a vampire, starring in the film merely as a bargain with the megalomanic Murnau before draining the entire cast and crew of blood. It’s a gas because for years cinephiles have speculated about Schreck — his unforgettable visage, ridiculous name (“schreck” translates as “horror” or “to frighten” in German), and scantly verifiable resume inspired years of idle and discomfiting speculation that, perhaps, this mustiest of silent Gothics contained secrets we could never understand. Wondering if Schreck was something substantially different than the little biographical information we have on him gave Nosferatu an extra degree of chill, a subterranean frisson singular among German Expressionist landmarks. Of course it’s nonsense (makeup-free head shots of him can be easily found online), with Merhige and screenwriter Steven Katz tossing truth gleefully to the wind, as they should, and Willem Dafoe’s Schreck (an Oscar nomination) is a masterpiece of monster comedy.
283/365: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Sturges’ handful of comedies are veritable beehives of comic energy, but this wartime blast is so fraught with deranged tension about what we imagine the director wants us to think about his characters that by the time it ends you feel as if you’ve given birth to the damn thing yourself. What is traditionally conceived as a “happy ending” is meaningless in Sturges’s galaxy — his films are all burstingly happy from start to finish, and what sometimes feels like a dramatic interlude meant to give the comedy emotional bearings is often Sturges’s way of making fun of us. The cataract of machine-gun dialogue is dazzling, but it’s the movie’s subject that still makes your jaw drop: in WWII-mired 1944, here was a film about a smalltown ditz named Gertrude Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) who wakes up one morning with a vague memory of having drunkenly met, eloped with and gotten pregnant by a soldier she can’t remember anything about. (Except his name, which was “something like Ratskywatsky” — Sturges outplayed even W.C. Fields’s panache with names.) The chaos that ensues once Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) volunteers to say he’s the father goes eighteen ways at once, and to see Sturges put those balls in the air and keep them there is to watch narrative comedy at its most superhuman. That Trudy ends up bearing sextuplets, and no one cares that there is a real Ratskywatsky somewhere, is Sturges’ final triumph, as hilarious as it is remarkably unchained from the strictures of the Production Code.
284/365: Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin, 2008) (Fandor, Amazon Prime, Vimeo)
Found-footage satirist Baldwin mixes his free-associative stew of old pulp, educational film, et al., with newly shot footage, fashioning a “not untrue saga” (according to its proliferating titles and non-stop, multi-voice narrations) that wormholes through the origins of Scientology, bopping back and forth from the postwar past and the indeterminately cosmic future, as both are impacted by the pentagrammatical influence of, in turn, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, Jet Propulsion Lab co-founder and occult wingnut Jack Parsons, aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin (here personified by a person named “Lockheed Martin”), and New Age progenitor Marjorie Cameron. It is indeed not untrue: the sexual/mystical/financial history of Parsons, Cameron (both Crowley devotees) and Hubbard in the 1940s makes for stampede reading wherever you find it, but of course Baldwin fictionalizes the characters’ wacko ambitions into “reality,” cheesily invoking Hubbard’s blowhard pseudo-ideas about the future of the human race. At its least a fugue of speculations voiced by psychotic characters and illustrated by hunks of Star Trek, Things to Come, Logan’s Run, THX 1138, industrial project films, real news footage, NASA clips, Kenneth Anger images (borrowed and recreated, including shots of Cameron from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), and an uncataloguable river of other materials, the movie often succumbs to megalomaniacal confusion, befitting its subject.
285/365: Afterschool (Antonio Campos, 2008) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
A big festival hit but otherwise an brash indie too grim and severe to really break out in theaters, Campos’s movie is a formidably controlled, brilliant, scary piece of work, an unmistakable art film that’s sleek and cool yet shot and framed off-center, as if the camera were just rolling without the actor’s knowledge. Every wide-screen shot suggests a mystery, a secret story. In fact, the mumbling, introverted protagonist, Robert (Ezra Miller), mitigates his loneliness and awkwardness by joining his New England prep school’s AV club, and the film is liberally punctuated with footage he shoots, climaxing with an innocuous study of an empty hallway that, after a while, accidentally captures two blonde twin students screaming and hemorrhaging after doing some badly cut coke. The view we get of this over-nurtured environment is openly hostile — the boys are mostly sullen shitheels, the girls are victims waiting for their fate, the teachers are blathering moralizers. But there’s not a streotype in sight, as Robert negotiates a crush on a co-ed and, after the twins’ death, takes on the task of making a memorial video — until Campos sidles in a Blow-Up-slash-Cache-style mystery, as Robert and his friends discover a different recording of the twins’ death from a different angle, suggesting all kinds of hidden plots and motivations, leading to climactic moments, hinting at sociopathic urges haunting the stacks and halls like radio waves, that snatch your breath.
286/365: The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944) (Dailymotion)
Famously, Hollywood’s first authentic ghost story, and a slick, romantic, even sometimes campy potboiler that, in its most crystalline genre moments, still delivers an irresistible darkness-at-the-bottom-of-the-stairs frisson not available to any other subgenre. However glib the film gets, the sound of sobbing in the darkness runs up the back of your neck on little clawed feet. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey star as an oddly coupled brother and sister who decide to buy a haunted Cornwall-cliffside mansion, and the resident moaners and weepers therein compel them to get involved with local secrets, namely Gail Russell, a haunted village lass standing astride a backstory of possession and murder. Because it’s the first, and because it was still wartime, Allen’s film cannot hope to chin up against films more than 15 years later, like The Innocents (1961) or The Haunting (1963). But it’s an expert launch of pulp all the same, burned into the psyche of moviegoers in its day, fueled by Milland’s particular brand of secretive cynicism and by Russell, whose fragile, haunted demeanor serves the context in unforgettable ways; to learn about her subsequent alcoholism and jittery ruin is to feel a real Hollywood ghost story in your bones.
287/365: Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito, 2007) (Fandor, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Gianvito’s experimental documentary is as lean and straightforward as they come: a silently radical visual essay on American history as it has been largely neglected and forgotten, and yet as it still reverberates through our contemporary moment and forms a crucifying pattern of oppression and imperialism. The filmmaker’s vehicle for this is the public monument — erected markers, gravestones, plaques and commemorative statues, found where they’ve been overlooked for aeons in the American wilderness of highway roadsides, town squares, weedy cemeteries, and public parks. A gifted shooter of landscapes, Gianvito simply examines the monuments chronologically, from the sites of Native American massacres, slave rebellions, and anti-union violence through to the stones erected in memory of Civil Rights Movement martyrs like Medger Evers. (Gianvito even found Daniel Shays’s unmarked grave, in a meadow.) Folded in are Thomas Paine’s comically located freeway-trodden burial site, reminders of the originator of the first labor union, the resting places of famous lefties (Dos Passos, Paul Goodman), and so on. The sites are collected for what they say and, implicitly, what they leave out, as well as how they connect into a pattern — and in its entirety the film is a leveling admonishment, about how little of the history we know (“Ford Hunger March”?), and also how it adds up, remembered or not, into an interrogation of every fake principle Americans hold dear. Of course, the majority of this discourse happens in your head; Gianvito just holds your hand and says, look.
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, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40
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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