Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 51
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
351/365: Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989) (Amazon Prime)
One of the key films of the indie “new wave” that roiled through the 1980s and resulted in, among a great many other things, Quentin Tarantino, Steve Soderbergh and Kevin Smith, Harris’ neglected film is a micro-budgeted interrogation of American race relations, tracing the tale of one William Douglas Street Jr., a Detroit-born inveterate con man compelled to pass himself off in professional identities he wasn’t qualified for: surgeon, corporate lawyer, French-speaking exchange student at Yale (without actually know how to speak French), etc. (In fact, several real players in Street’s real drama play themselves, including Detroit mayor Coleman Young.) In Harris’s purview, Street was a hopeless self-aggrandizer as well as a low-rent autodidact, and his purple, rhyming, R&B narration belittles everyone he meets as relentlessly as it puffs up his own plumage as the smartest man for miles. Of course, the real subject is the black man’s need and desire, in late-century American, to adopt and swap out identities so he might fit within the white hierarchy; the sense of genuine self is a casualty of latent racism, while at the same time Street can “pass” for anything as long as he occupies largely white environments, where he is, essentially, as “invisible” as Ralph Ellison. The film’s crude, cheap visuals come off as an opportunistic parody of blaxploitation filmmaking, and those films’ disturbed sense of empowerment and social dynamics. Burdened by tons of Street’s seriously witless summary judgments and smooth romantic seduction-chat, the movie remains probing and singular.
352/365: Chunhyang (Im Kwon-taek, 2000) (YouTube)
A one-of-a-kind Korean New Wave oddity, torn between a meta-movie ambiguity, an immersion in traditional Korean folkways, and a desire to hawk the ancient cultural forms to the world’s mezzobrow. Essentially, it’s a musical — the classic Korean folktale (a kind of Tristan and Isolde fable) is traditionally performed as pansori, the bluesy throat acrobatics of which wallpaper the movie from beginning to end. Standing on a stage with a seated drummer, facing an actual contemporary audience, pansori champ Cho Sang Hyun croons, screams, barks and yowls his way through the tragic tale — it’s like B.B. King on steroids, particularly when you consider that pansori performances can last four hours or more. Im freely cuts back to Cho and to his shout-back, dancing-in-the-aisles audience, but most often the singing serves as narration. Chunhyang herself (Lee Hyo Jung) is a beautiful, principled maiden with a courtesan for a mother; once she is spied by Mongryong (Cho Seung Woo), the governor’s son and an ardent student, it’s only a matter of bicker and tussle before the two are swearing eternal devotion to each other. Having consummated their self-declared matrimony, the union is thus sundered by circumstance: Mongryong’s father is being transferred and, being of a lower class, Chunhyang must wait behind. In years following, a new governor considers Chunhyang a courtesan by law, and when she refuses to obey, all hell breaks loose. The movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais. (The pansori is often hollered in ironic stereo with the characters’ actual dialogue.) Thoroughly un-Westernized, the movie reworks the idea of movies into a proto-trad modernism.
353/365: The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (Dave Borthwick, 1993) (YouTube)
A mere hour long and packed with enough visual invention for a dozen movies, this stop-motion creep-out freely exhibits the influence of the Quays and of Eraserhead, taking a crazy potshot at post-industrialism and reducing a common landscape to poisoned rubble and merciless scientific progress. The film opens in a factory producing zygotes for a presumably impotent populace, a fluorescent-lit process mucked up, for the moment, by a giant wasp who gets caught in the machinery and sets the assembly line awry. (Borthwick has filled the film with troublesome insects, some self-fashioned from metal scraps.) Next we meet a miserable, destitute couple in a filthy flat; the woman suddenly gives birth to a baby mutant, apparently not realizing she was indeed pregnant. They name him Tom (though the dialogue is as pixilated as the action, and isn’t exactly English), and before long corporate hoods break in and whisk Tom away to the lab from which he came. The lab itself is a masterpiece of fearsome abuse and caged mutations, but once Tom befriends another, far grislier freak and escapes, the film creates an oppressed underground of miniature proletariat mutants (all dressed like medieval shepherds), and Tom’s adventures become political as well as visceral. In a milieu that resembles a Jan Trnka film trapped in a septic tank, Tom meets Jack the Giant Killer, and they begin a search for Tom’s father. Overcome with rot, the film’s vibe glories in the icky potential of puppet animation, and there’s a disquieting idea in every shot.
354/365: Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970) (BitChute, FlixFling, YouTube, DailyMotion)
A phantom film for decades, Skolimowski’s movie, his first after exiling himself to the UK in the late ’60s, is a strangely impetuous study in a coming-of-age sexual muddle, full of whimsy and abrupt ideas, and intoxicated from a distance, it seems, by Swinging London’s free-love commerce. The focus is on Mike (the reedy, dewily beautiful John Moulder-Brown, registering as the perfect specimen Michael York wanted to be in 1970), who takes a job at a rundown swim club/bathhouse. He’s prey to every middle-aged woman who walks in, but he only has naive eyes for Susan (Jane Asher) (yes, that Jane Asher), a co-worker and dissatisfied party girl who’s dallying with a lech swim teacher just as she eggs on an obnoxious but wealthy fianceé. The obsessive flirtation doesn’t build to a tipping point so much as smash around, alternate between happy communion and spitting jealousy, and eventually meet with an ultracool tragic-ironic end. Partially shot in Munich and then postdubbed (that chilly Eastern Europe feeling isn’t an accident), the film leaves Mike’s psychosexual confusion largely open for interpretation; far more entrancing is Asher herself, whose defensive, private go-go girl is deceived into thinking she’s using men rather than vice-versa. There is also no underestimating the power of her orange-sherbet-meets-Truffula-plumes coif, which floats hypnotically through the film like a royal jellyfish. Skolimowski’s Eastern Bloc-existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.
355/365: The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992) (The Criterion Channel)
A technically edgy, churlish film with its middle finger stuckhigh in the air, Araki’s New Queer Cinema landmark is a 90s road movie apothoesis — no one’s ever had as much a reason to f**k the system (sometimes literally) and take off as its HIV-positive gay pair of hard-luck misfits. Soon after learning his test results and beginning a journal-on-tape (“Death is weird,” he concludes), Jon (Craig Gilmore), a slim film writer bearing no small resemblance to a young Peter Fonda, meets up with Luke (Mike Dytri), a laconic muscle-bound free-floater whose recent experiences on the fringe have included escaping a pair of homicidal lesbians and in turn using their gun to kill three would-be gay-bashers. It’s not long after the first of several passionate sex scenes that Luke shows up in the middle of the night and confesses to killing a cop, a la Breathless. (Jon’s room is decorated with Godard posters.) Together they take it on the lam with only the vaguest idea of destination. As you’d expect from a post-punk movie with a prominent “Choose Death” bumper sticker, the outsider-rebel nihilism is cool and politically charged, and Araki makes up for what his film lacks in technical proficiency and polish with scads of attitude. Using AIDS as the pretense for a romantic outlaw nose-thumbing is a matter of taste, and Araki admittedly has none.
356/365: Female Prisoner Scorpion (Shunya Ito & Yasuharu Hasebe, 1972–73) (Shudder, Amazon Prime)
These four berserk Japanese pulp-fests — Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, and Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song — are proto-Tarantino explosions of softcore violence and pop-art style, a rambling women’s-prison/vengeance odyssey in which a lone beauty (the ever-iconic Meiko Kaji) battles the male world (in particular, a certain vicious prison warden, played by Fumio Watanabe) in a spiraling exchange of rape/torture/imprisonment and bloodletting revenge of all kinds. Ito (the first three films) stopped at nothing, and saw no reason not to stop-motion animate his heroine’s hair, wash sets in contrasting Day-Glo colors, spasm characters into Kabuki make-up, shoot through glass floors that weren’t there, and so on; the cycle’s upshot is of a cyclone of voguing gender war, scored to a single plaintive pop ballad, Scorpion’s “grudge song… of vengeance!” No pulp radiates campy rage and creative extremities like Japanese pulp, and these simultaneously exploitative and hyper-feminist trips take you where no American movie would ever dare.
357/365: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes, 2006) (Documentary Mania, Kanopy, YouTube)
A unique effort at making a film that is itself a protracted, free-wheeling act of film criticism and commentary, this doc puts famed theorist/pundit Slavoj Zizek at center stage, in what amounts to a semi-interactive lecture on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory illustrated with film clips. Zizek, Slovenian lisp-monster that he is, is world-renowned for a reason: he’s a terrific communicator, popularizer and provocateur as well as an interpretive idea volcano. “Lacan” is never mentioned in this three-part, 2.5-hour tour through popular cinema, but Freud certainly is, and the inexperienced would do well to see it twice and assume that virtually every utterance out of Zizek’s spittle-firing mouth is a concept worthy of another half-hour of exegesis. A good liberal-arts bachelor’s-degree grasp of Freudian psychoanalysis is pretty much essential, but otherwise you just need eyes: Zizek’s hand-holding walks through entire chunks of Blue Velvet, Psycho, Vertigo, The Matrix, The Great Dictator and The Conversation are never less than a blast, because Fiennes contrives (through clever set-building and Remko Schnorr’s digital cinematography) to place the always-anxious-always-splenetic Zizek literally within the films’ scenes, watching Isabella Rossellini’s demi-rape in Blue Velvet from the couch, or the writhings of Linda Blair from the corner of the arctic bedroom in The Exorcist, and often talking over the action. The subject here, for the most part, is sex, insofar as sex is manifested as moviewatching and vice-versa. Except perhaps when he’s pointing out how Gene Hackman in The Conversation seems to be literally examining the scene of the murder from Psycho (a painfully obvious inter-film connection I never noticed before), Zizek is all about how the films literally and profoundly “teach us lessons,” symbolically, about desire, about subjectivity, about the strange but universal need for sexual fantasy (and how it’s expressed as the voyeurism of cinema-watching), about our conflicted relationship with the sexual significance of various body parts. Of course, a percentage of what Zizek says is half-conceived and presumptuous, but his juicy bon mots are always challenging (“I want a third pill!” he declares, in view of The Matrix’s inadequate dichotomy between illusion and reality). At the very least, those of us who’ve only seen Vertigo or Lost Highway or Tarkovsky’s Solaris once long ago will be inspired with a convert’s fervor to sit down and reevaluate them with new eyes.
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, 49, 50
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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