Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 8
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
50/365: Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Perhaps the only wide-screen-Oscar-epic behemoth from the ’50s and ’60s that fully lives up to its extraordinary reputation, this historical monster is a veritable shrine to the days when visual spectacle meant staging huge events in extraordinary places — stuff you can’t fake with a computer. Still, it’s a more fabulous, ambiguous launch into historical psychodrama than it’s ever been given credit for, with easily the most perverse and original hero in its genre’s history. Opportunist and moralist, sadist and masochist, exotica-entranced English fart and effeminate tribal godling, Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence, as English envoy sent to Arabia during WWI to help the Arab tribes fight off the Ottoman Turks’ invasion, is such a freak all that’s clear about him by the film’s end is that his only true place of belonging is on the absurd mantle of posthumous myth. Obviously, you should see it on the biggest screen you can find, but the film’s vast visual integrity is apparent to the naked eye even if you watched it on your phone. Which you shouldn’t.
51/365: Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Cool and simple but resonating invisibly out into our lives like an x-ray, Haneke’s insidious film is a mystery wrapped in a tangle of sightlines — you are rarely confident about what you’re watching, and never sure that watching will be enough. A bobo Parisian couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) are inexplicably haunted by videotapes taken of them, by cameras that cannot have been present; eventually, the ensuing paranoia not only begins to unravel their family but to reveal sins of the past that resonate outward, roping in France’s colonialist sins. All the while, Haneke implicates us in the surveillance — with each new shot, we’re never sure if what we’re watching is “live” or another piece of surveillance, or if the point of view is “ours” or someone else’s, complete with secret agenda. Haneke is not our only hardcore existentialist, but he might be the most pure-minded; Cache (“hidden,” as Auteuil’s crumbling modern man says, about everything) has a Mandelbrot set’s molecular uniformity, and a devilish structure that makes every cut an occasion for what-is-it-now heebie-jeebies. Metaphorically, it’s a gold-plated Rorschach plot — what’s inadvertently revealed is political, personal, familial, cosmic, and all of the above.
52/365: Overlord (Stuart Cooper, 1975) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
This oddity split a Silver Bear in 1975 Berlin, an odd achievement for a low-budget British film about WWII that’s composed of 50% or more of archival footage. Cooper’s ambitions were primarily textural — he spent years hunting through the national archives for images from the most photographed war ever waged, and used period lenses and film stock for the fictional material. His co-conspirator was august cinematographer John Alcott, who shot in a fastidiously anachronistic style immediately before realizing the candelit universe of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. The story is rather All Quiet-ish, and deliberately generic: an unassuming lad (Brian Stirmer) signs up, endures basic training and eventually faces combat, confronting the meat grinder of Normandy Beach during the eponymous invasion. The film’s revivification of a wasteland Europe offers up a powerful whip-lesson for the post-war complacent: that the waging of war, even this most romanticized of conflicts, means bringing a corpse-mountain hell to someone’s home neighborhood.
53/365: Aniara (Pella Kagerman & Hugo Lilja, 2019) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
A nihilistic Swedish sci-fi film? Based on a beloved epic poem by a Nobel winner? This fascinating new genre moan is something like the anti-Ad Astra; its blatant and hopeless existentialist probings are more along the lines of Russians like Tarkovsky and Sokurov. A vast, self-sustaining, luxury-mall-like space ferry to Mars is sent off course, with its fuel jettisoned — thus beginning a literally endless drift into space, with the only balm to the hopelessness being an AI therapy room that allows visitors to enjoy a VR walk on Earth (the way it used to be, with grass and trees). Of course, as years pass, even the AI surrenders hope and self-destructs, love and distraction and entertainment are lunged upon as solutions and then fade, suicide, madness and murder become common, and the pointless voyage’s parallel to our lives, spent inexorably moving forward in time with no destination, turns harrowing.
54/365: Black Cat, White Cat (Emir Kusturica, 1998) (Amazon Prime)
Anyone familiar with the films of the Sarajevo-born Kusturica knows what they’re in for with this unrestrained absurdism, about a Rom enclave on the banks of the Danube, a festering nest of stray animals, sniping neighbors, grifters, crooks, and layabouts, as it primes for a particularly troublesome wedding. Car-eating pigs, humping dogs, begging gypsies, dwarf brides, gold-toothed paraplegic mobsters, hidden corpses: the Slavic yen for explosive peasant folk nastiness is turned up to 11, and you’ll never be bored. The humor is often crude, but Kusturica’s films all intend on being filthy, hungry parades of life, and you can;’t say they don’t get there. Sure, exhausting,but who’s going to complain about a movie with too much stuff in it?
55/365: Decasia (Bill Morrison, (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
In non-narrative, “experimental” film circles, the entire issue of “found” film is a fascinating conundrum — which of its layered, contradictory purposes are relevant? If avant-gardists like Craig Baldwin or Bruce Conner scramble old industrial/government footage into new and ironic forms, who’s the author? Can it “mean” or “be” two things at once? This feature-length assemblage, which Errol Morris said might be “the greatest film” of all time, is predicated entirely on the issue of nitrate stock decay. Or, maybe it’s about how bewitchingly beautiful the rotting images are, and how heartbreakingly ephemeral all movies are. The footage is of virtually any variety and from any source — Morrison hunted the world’s lesser archives for ill-preserved film that had begun to dissipate: travelogues, old Asian serials, home movies, test shots, circus footage, etc. The images are all compromised by decay in varying ways and to varying degrees, and although a fin de siecle boxer may seem to throw jabs at a metamorphic column of liquidy rot, for the most part the film is a series of fairly typical silent-film images that virtually dissolve away before our eyes, like fading memories. The upshot to this can be very unsetlling, an effect multiplied by Michael Gordon’s deliberately dissonant orchestral score, which was actually composed first. It’s a trip to watch, but also a hall or mirrors to ponder: these images have been rescued in order to make them erase their own initial purpose and express their neglected decay. If they hadn’t decayed (or decayed enough) would they have any purpose at all? Can scrapped cultural detritus naturally beset by chemical entropy become art just because someone says it is? What is cinema, except chemically apprehended memory?
56/365: Alraune (Henrik Galeen, 1928) (YouTube)
This late-game German silent has an almost pathological root in Teutonic legend — the one about the mandrake root (“alraune” in German) growing in gallows soil and fed by the ejaculate of hanged men. Galeen was adapting Hanns Heinz Ewers’s novel, in which a scientist (Paul Wegener) investigates genetic destiny by impregnating a hooker with just such residue, and then acts as the offspring’s father, until she grows up to be a hellzapoppin Brigitte Helm. Here in a sense is the Nazi preoccupation with racial engineering and inheritance, but twisted into a father-daughter Frankenstein story whose monster is a selfish (read: self-determining) teenage tramp who escapes from her convent and just wants to have fun, even if that means driving her patriarch crazy with jealousy and lust. Wegener makes for a formidably mountain-faced demagogue, but the movie’s main engine is Helm, instantly famous as the robotrix in Metropolis a year earlier. No other actress ever moved exactly like Helm; ferret-like, lurid and as slouched as a Harryhausen homunculus, she manifests her character’s dramatic peaks like she’s leading an experimental dance version of Salome, radiating sexual power with every twist and saunter. It’s a slow film — and one that was remade two years later with sound, to no substantial advantage — but it builds to a stunning landslide of sexual compulsion and incest mania, and was unsurprisingly censored in many countries, including Great Britain.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
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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