Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 49
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
337/365: Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964) (Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Amazon Prime)
The bruising, hypnotic dog-eat-dog Japanese New Wave counterpart to Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (released the same year), Shindo’s horror-ordeal is one of the most dire visions to emerge from that country’s postwar culture. The scenario is merciless: during the feudal-era wars, a woman and her daughter-in-law (the son/husband in question has been Shanghaied, and never returns) living in a vast field of suzuki grass feed themselves by stalking and killing passing soldiers, selling their armor and swords to a local trader and then tumbling the bodies into a hidden well. But a third jungle predator — a runaway soldier as savvy as the women — disrupts the perfect balance struck between cannibalistic opportunism, lifeboat ethics and a landscape that’s both mystery-keeping metaphor and richly tactile. The irrationality of sexual hunger trumps the Darwinian clarity of predation, or the clarity of sexual alliance destroys the feral psychosis fostered by frontier survival, depending on how much cynicism you apply to Shindo’s scenario. A lot, you’d think, especially once you remember the chilling moment when the soldier exits the trader’s den and passes by another mother-daughter team, sunburnt and seething, carrying their own load of ill-gotten swords and armor. Shindo had a long career, but in this iteration he was a ’60s firestarter capable of igniting tension via flaring close-ups, sweaty sexual frustration, and haiku cutaways to the obscuring drifts of grass, again and again. We also catch a glimpse here of a major concern of the filmmaker’s that percolated from one end of his long filmography to the other: the furious fascination with the abuses women suffer within Japan’s masculine-cult society.
338/365: Privilege (Peter Watkins, (1967) (BFI Player)
The aboriginal master of mock-docs and dystopias — always in conjunction — Watkins was always a hard sell and an incorruptible force for truth, and this is his most orthodox and even commercial film, utilizing the filmmaker’s trademarked fake-non-fiction format (narration, interviews, etc.), but otherwise almost “normal,” a frank portrait of a near-future dystopia structured around rock stardom and heartthrob messiah-hood. Callow Manfred Man ex-singer Paul Jones is Steve Shorter, an unexceptional ’60s front man whose life and persona has been exploded out into a ubiquitous brand-name cataract — “Steve” — from massively attended concert performances featuring on-stage police brutality scenarios to hundreds of “Steve Shorter Discotheques,” from television endorsements for whatever products the government wants to promote, to Steve malls whose announcements insist that busy customers will “be” Steve. At the outset, we’re simply told in Watkins’s meta-BBC narration that Steve’s defiant, pitiable act (witnessed by crowds of screaming, crying girls) siphons off the “nervous tension” in society, and that as a result he is “the most desperately loved entertainer in the world.” Of course, at the woozy center of this militarized shill is Shorter himself, nearly comatose and only faintly bristling with restless rebellion. Like Network (1976), Privilege is an ignored prophecy that’s been allowed to come true — it’s a short enough leap from the everywhere-everything “Steve” brand to the “Buy ‘N Large” empire of WALL-E (2008), and to the actual five-multinational-company media-world we live in. Watkins’s climactic concert sequence crash-lands a cherry atop the construct, a huge proto-fascist stadium rally robbed years later by Pink Floyd, complete with burning torches, black arm bands, giant distorted banner-portraits of Shorter, a Hitlerian preacher delivering a fiery speech extolling conformity, and a band playing a lugubrious psychedelic cover of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” all of it conceived and executed as an expression of a new, Anglican “nationalism.”
339/365: Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995) (Vimeo, Kanopy, EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
This rabid bear of a movie, the definitive absurdist articulation of the insane Balkan ’90s and one of its decade’s most outrageous European films, won at Cannes, daring to make a death-rattle farce out of the Yugoslav Wars only after skewering the entire modern history of Yugoslavia itself — the nation reimagined as a lie, a grift an inherently profane and indulgent people told themselves for 44 years. “Communism,” then, was just a chintz uniform dressing up the venality, which in the film’s scenario translates to a chunk of the multi-ethnic population, believing WWII has never ended, kept underground and producing arms (for profit) while the 20th Century rolls on above them. Kusturica’s heroes are yowling, brawling black-market crooks (Miki Manojlovic and Lazar Ristovski, one engineering the subterfuge above while the other spends decades in the ever-expanding bunker), and he gumps them into newsreels, has them mix disastrously with the production of a propaganda film based on their (nonexistent) wartime heroism, and eventually has them meet across battle lines in the ’90s. (Before the country all but vanishes, vast tunnels full of trucks and refugees are discovered beneath all of Europe — how real life and commerce thrived during the surface absurdity of the Cold War.) For Kusturica, “Yugoslavia” was an illusion of communal intent, while the goldbrickers and bastards continued their work in the shadows. Performed always in the key of Way Too Much, exuding a crass exuberance that’s all but impossible to resist, Underground might be the sourest party movie ever made about its own country. Which doesn’t mean it’s not clogged with pulp lyricism, or salient in its allegory.
340/365: Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947) (Flix Fling, OK.Ru)
Walsh’s film is arguably the first modernist Western, structured around an Oedipal crisis and hidden memories, shot with a noir’s darkling dread, and crafted so that the characters, not just Robert Mitchum’s traumatized Everyman, all range wildly across their personal ethical spectrums. Mitchum’s Jeb is holed up in the ruins of his childhood house waiting for a lynch mob to arrive, and struggles to remember the cascade of events that brought him there — from his mysterious orphaning as a child and adoption by secretive prairie mom Judith Anderson, to his maturation and rivalry with stepbrother (a disarming John Rodney), his dawning love for stepsister Teresa Wright, and his undecipherable kinship to malevolent one-armed frontier politico Dean Jagger, who has been quietly plotting to kill Jeb since he was a boy. But why? The questions, poised in a remarkably complicated screenplay by Wright’s husband Niven Busch, are more naturally provocative than the answers, but in the meantime the story twists the central family in knots, and even Mitchum’s relaxed stolidness has moments of frazzled tension. Cutting new ground, as a western full of psychological ambiguity and moral mystery, Walsh’s programmer opened the door for the genre’s major works to come, from Anthony Mann’s ’50s dramas to High Noon and The Searchers. Shot by James Wong Howe with some of the sky-darkening tricks beloved of Kalatozov-partner Sergei Urusevsky, Walsh’s is a magnificent and brisk yarn, overplayed in occasional moments of Hitchcockian energy but mostly serenely Walshian — that is, invested in the story and not interested in wasting your time.
341/365: Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson, 1999) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Levinson returns for the fourth time, after Diner, Tin Men and Avalon, to Baltimore, focusing on being Jewish and being a teenager in 1955, and luxuriating in the vibe; more time and attention is spent watching two kids listen to R&B records than on a gunpoint kidnapping. It’s a film buoyant with quiet smiles and unpretentious fondness, and even the ever-present racial politics are treated as no more or less a factor of the times than the carpets, the kitchens and the looming-cliff hairdos. Wet-eared high schooler Ben (Ben Foster) contemplates a romance with a sublimely intelligent and relaxed black girl (Rebekah Johnson, who steals the movie, and that year in movies), while big brother Van (Adrien Brody) tries to comprehend the motel-room meltdown of the ravishing blue-blood blonde (Carolyn Murphy) he’d pursued through the whole film, and the filmmaker’s trademarked lallygagging around the diner and in period cars, as all-American boys try to define themselves by talking trash about girls and obsessing on pop singers, is a rare pleasure. It’s inhabited, calm and generous, and makes you wish Levinson had stayed in Baltimore for good.
342/365: Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison, 2017) (Mubi, Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
It’s a sign of hope for the medium, that Bill Morrison, arcane found-footage wizard and poet of nitrate decay, is nearly a household word by now, with his films routinely feted at The New York Film Festival, showcased in the Venice Biennial and, most brazenly of all, released onto actual movie screens. Using only archivals, Morrison’s got the market cornered on a simple trope: how film reflects memory’s unreliability and time’s inexorable destruction. This film is about its own history, too — starting with a simple explanation of how nitrate was invented (as an explosive), and how the stock’s ridiculously fiery tendencies have shaped film history. The story moves to a massive, frozencache of early-century films uncovered in the 70s in Dawson City, Alaska, allowing Morrison to launch into a leisurely portrait of the Yukon Gold Rush, Dawson City’s origins and growth (where, among a great many others, Fred Trump began his fortune, with a brothel), the industrialization of mining, WWI, the interwar combat between labor and government, and so on. The Dawson City footage — over 370 films, some shot in the Yukon, some simply shipped in for the entertainment of the shifting hordes of claim-stakers — zips by in bullet-like blips, and we see what Dawsonites saw, on the frozen edge of frontier: local prospector dramas as well as imported travelogues, serials, melodramas, newsreels, and nature films, every bit of it from films of which the Dawson City print is the only copy to have survived. It’s an orgy for film geeks and history jonsers, to be sure, and how exactly the prints got waylaid and then buried in the permafrost, saved by being the victims of Dawson City’s evolution as a fading town in the 20th century, is one of Morrison’s sweet narrative rewards.
343/365: Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971) (Mubi, Fandor, Amazon Prime)
Like a sleeping giant we’ve only heard rumors about, Rivette’s New Wave gargantua has loomed out of sight for over 40 years. Over 12.5 hours long, filthy with frittered time and elliptical narrative hijinks, a swollen testament to its maker’s defiance, it was never actually “lost” — it was merely so huge, so unaccommodating, so anti-everything, that being abandoned to the catacombs seemed like its destiny. Restored, subtitled and released in an actual theatrical engagement for the first time ever in 2015, the film is a rambling daydream that aims to literally supplant your life. In effect a serial, in eight 90+-minute chapters, TV-ready but defined by Rivette as a consuming theatrical experience, a modern version of the silent mystery serials of Louis Feuillade. The threads running throughout the movie pit the intimate but secret schemes of collectives against the will of rogue individuals, the latter personified beguilingly by Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto as two separate petty scam artists wandering the streets, and stumbling each in turn into the mystery of a loosely defined cult of shadow figures. It’s a conspiracy, apparently, involving scores of the other characters, but its agenda is never made clear. These travels eventually crisscross with two separate experimental theater groups exhaustingly rehearsing two different Aeschylus plays and engaging in all manner of primal-scream acting exercises, preparing for performances that never happen. Woven into the mesh are fruitless meetings at a store called The Corner of Chance (owned by serene cabal member Bulle Ogier), visits to a beach house with a rotating cast of inhabitants, a fascinating interview with director Eric Rohmer as a Balzac scholar, lots of questions about a pivotal figure named Pierre we never see, an alarming bar brawl between Frederique and a thug she knows, and a profusion of multiple identities, multiple masks and multiple romantic betrayals. Throughout, as usual in Rivetteland, the sense of something ominous happening somewhere, outside the frame, is palpable; even the staring bystanders on the street scan as part of the conspiracy. But it’s hardly a narrative or text, just an experience: like a chess game, or a stroll, or an acting exercise. Or, perhaps, almost a documentary of a handful of other films and plays that never coalesce, while for the filmmaker everything filmed already exists in a mysterious other-world, where a bullet wound oozes orange paint and Lewis Carrollisms are hidden in the streets of Paris.
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, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48
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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