Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 11
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
71/365: 24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017) (Criterion Channel)
About a year and a half after Kiarostami’s death came his last vestigial launch into the void, a feature that can be thought of as an experiment with time, or an ambient essay on the act of watching. It is what it says it is — 24 “frames,” images digitally extrapolated out into four-and-a-half-minute unconnected, unmoving set-piece shots. Sometimes an image is cadged from an outside source — #1 is Bruegel’s “The Hunters in the Snow,” augmented with actively falling snow, live crows and dogs, and chimney smoke. Most often, they’re beautiful natural images, of beaches and snowy landscapes, occupied by birds, cows, deer, wolves, and so on, all wandering and listening to the wind and tending to their private business. Two wild horses court in the snow seen through an open car window, sheep huddle headfirst around a tree in another snowstorm with wolves showing up in the distance as we fade to black, various beaches become pensive mini-dramas of battling gulls, ducks separated by fences, roaming cows. But not so simple: the hold-your-breath wildlife on view is both genuine and completely contrived, set digitally into sometimes painterly landscapes, and layered from unconnected materials. Each tableau is rich with tension, between narrative and nothingness, control and wildness, spontaneous animal behavior and CGI invention, what is seen in the frame and what occurs off-screen, the simple act of seeing and Kiarostami’s gentle suggestions of meaning. Humanity, strangely enough for this director, is barely there.
72/365: The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924) (Mubi, Archive.org, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Kanopy)
Murnau’s German Expressionist film-school classic remains a must-see, a lavishly realized parable that’s as famous for its Murnovian “subjective camera” mise-en-scene (he reused many of the tropes a few years later in Hollywood, in Sunrise) as it is slighted for its simplistic morality-tale story, in which Emil Jannings’s self-important luxury hotel doorman becomes demoted, due to his age, down the company ladder to lowly washroom attendant. Today, the famously intertitle-free film no longer scans merely as an indictment of hubris and status-mongering — after all, how far does the fat old fool actually fall? (He lives, with a deluded sense of importance, in a ghetto.) The emphasis, visually realized and otherwise, focuses on the character’s point of view, but if you step back, The Last Man (as it was originally titled) plays like a parable on service industry exploitation, a downsizing nightmare, and thus it is not far from Kafka, or from contemporary America. The tacked-on happy ending insisted upon the producer, which declares itself to be improbable, has never satisfied or convinced anyone. But the film’s a landmark no matter how you read the thrust (Murnau set a high bar for the moving camera’s expressive, dreamlike force that became a running gold thread through cinema history, up to and including the 21st-century one-shot perambulations, digitally doctored or otherwise, like Russian Ark, Victoria and 1917), and with time its proletariat message has only gained force.
73/365: Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 2004) (Ok.Ru)
Derived from a (currently) untranslated Frank Wedekind story, and seething with conceptual potency, this debut movie is a verdant, ambiguous dream of childhood, consciousness and oppression, a Rorschach-blot scenario played out in feminized Old World ritual. We’re in a vast tract of European forest, illuminated by chandelier lamps, subgrounded with what seems to be an ancient, rumbling sewer system, and surrounded by an unscalable wall. At the center lies a huge girls’ school, populated by only two teachers (Marion Cotillard and Hélène de Fougerolles) and a dozen or so prepubescent girls, each wearing age-coded hair ribbons, new students arriving in suddenly materialized coffins and with fading memories of their families and lives outside. There are no men, and many rules. The school maintains a nurturing, if constricting, cloistered atmosphere, but there are glimpses of matters — disappearances, deaths, violations — we, like the students, never fully understand. The girls, gently examined, indoctrinated and trained in matters of traditional girlishness, are being certainly being groomed, but for what? A debut filmmaker with electrifying confidence, Hadzihalilovic cat-plays with our instant sense of dread — unanswered narrative questions are supposed to have horrifying answers, right? But it’s all metaphor, a fable of puberty told not as awakening but as subjugation. In its view of childhood as totalitarian citizenship, Hadzihalilovic’s film stands, quietly, in a gender-furious class by itself.
74/365: My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) (Vudu, YouTube, Tubi, Fandor, Amazon Prime, The Film Detective)
This famous screwball masterpiece centers on the inimitable Carole Lombard as a loopy, dimwitted heiress who hauls “forgotten man” William Powell off a rubbish heap in a scavenger hunt, and hires him as her wildly eccentric family’s butler. Only Lombard had the brio and style in the ’30s to handle the film’s comedic and romantic idioms simultaneously, and only Lombard could be convincingly dopey and blazingly impressive in the same instant. Shot in the glossy Art Deco style so beloved during the Depression, the film bounces happily between social critique, outright slapstick and romantic fluff as few American films have been able to do since. The casting alone is brilliant: Alice Brady as the pretentious clan mother, Mischa Auer as her ludicrous artiste protege, the spectacularly corpulent Eugene Pallette as the irritated patriarch, struggling to just finish a meal amid the eccentric shenanigans. Powell is, as he was in the contemporaneous Thin Man films, a dry martini of an actor, sharp and subtle and capable of comebacks so smooth you can skate on them. But Lombard’s the whole show. Written by Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch, Godfrey is one of the funniest, best written and least mannered of 30s comedies, but without Lombard it might only be as well-remembered today as, say, Theodora Runs Wild. Once you’re hooked on this woman’s lightning-like beauty, brown-sugar-&-cinnamon voice, babbling-brook line readings and overall unearthly nerve, there’s no turning back. Though a frantically busy actress, Lombard only made so many films before her tragic plane-crash death in 1942, and so the tragedy of her abrupt death remains with us, a loss we continue to feel more than 50 years later. My Man Godfrey may be a relentlessly funny movie, but real life makes it seem stirringly bittersweet.
75/365: Alice (Jan Svankmajer, 1988) (Fandor, Ovid, Kanopy, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Svankmajer, still kicking at 86, is an old-guard Surrealist and puppet animator who leapt to global fame with this adaptation of Lewis Carroll — his first feature, and easily the best version, because it dives deep into the tale’s psychosexual confusion, the idea of female puberty being a mud-wrestle with the irrationalities of the supposedly sane adult world. Of course, Svankmajer doesn’t tell the story — thin as it’s always been — so much as splatter it against the wall, loosely intersecting with the book but at the same time mustering an uncomfortable physical world of unpleasant juxtapositions, mucous mixtures, semi-animated impossibilities, revolting taxidermic tension, and a pervasive sense of real childhood danger (without, fascinatingly enough, inciting the merest drop of anxiety from his star, placid blond tyke Kristyna Kohoutova). Self-referential and playfully conscious of pedophiliac threat as only a Surrealist’s film could be, Svankmajer’s gritty movie does Carroll better than Carroll did Carroll, swapping the smarmy wordplay and faux innocence for the claustrophobia and stress you taste in a real dream.
76/365: Maidan (Sergei Loznitsa, 2014) (Vudu, Kanopy)
Before making the two of the the best post-Soviet-region films of the last decade — My Joy (2010) and In the Fog (2012) — the Ukrainian-bred Loznitsa was a documentarian, and here he returns to his original strategy, with a steely-eyed vengeance. History may not have given him much of a choice: once Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych opted to align with Putin’s Russia instead of Europe, Kievans by the thousands occupied the city’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), beginning the night of November 21, 2013. What could have been yet another ephemeral show of mass anger only grew in size and pride and determination as the days passed — by the time Loznitsa’s cameras showed up, the huge crowd had formed a bustling commune in the city center, set up a stage for speeches and poetry readings, created a viable village-in-a-city infrastructure, and erected barricades of junk that stretched nearly 20 feet in the air. Loznitsa’s formal approach is central: he anchors his camera and takes in an establishing-shot expanse, holding the image for often minutes at a time. We hear ambient sound, over layers of human action, as Ukrainians of all ages — burly Dads, hipster punks, tots, grandmas — mill about, dole out food, cheer, and break into song. It’s a vision of a people’s utopia, built out of social warmth and laureled with fireworks. The “Maidan” goes on for months, happily — until a new law is passed (“Greetings, criminals!” someone yells from the stage), the riot police appear for real, and the civilians begin breaking up bricks and making Molotovs. The protesting population remain bitterly unswayed — imagine this happening in an American city — and Loznitsa’s imagery becomes Dantean, the night filled with burning-tire smoke, water cannons, and the ominous phalanx of riot-gear body shields. Bodies accumulate on- and off-screen (about 100 killed, we’re told in a title card), accommodations are made for surrendering police (!), and eventually funeral marches enthrall the crowd.
77/365: White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982) (Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Fuller’s last great spike of Fullerian lightning, this strange, crude diatribe against racism is packed with the sledgehammer moments you expect from the man — but being put off by his unique smacked-face style means missing the brute power of his metaphors, and the audacity of his dialogue with society. It couldn’t be simpler: moderately employed actress Kristy McNichol hits a white German Shepherd with her car on a dark road, and takes him in. Soon it becomes apparent — after the canine escapes and then returns, simply hopping onto her bed from off-frame, covered in his victim’s blood — that the nameless dog has been trained as an attack animal. McNichol takes him to an animal trainer (Burl Ives), who correctly assesses the beast as not merely a schooled killer, but a “white dog,” a remnant of the early-to-mid 20th century South, where dogs were often trained from puppyhood to attack African Americans. A black trainer (Paul Winfield) decides to take the dog on — to retrain him rather than simply put him down, to correct this living, irrational embodiment of bigotry rather than simply kill it. Famously, White Dog is derived from a fictionalized account of a real incident written by French novelist Romain Gary (whose Black Panther-obsessed American wife, Jean Seberg, first adopted the questionable pooch). But the context is all-American, and the expression of this authentic historical monstrosity is Fuller’s primary glory. He iconizes the dog every which way, to the point that you’re aware, deep into the film, of not watching merely a dog but a demonic machine birthed out of America’s knack for self-destruction. Fuller’s punctuative images can be extraordinary: the close-up of the open black hand gently approaching the crazy dog’s fire-eyed, snarling face; the men circling around the chained animal as if he were a civilization-jeopardizing contagion (which, of course, metaphorically, he is), the dog leaping out of the trainers’ compound in an explosion of electric-fence sparks, like a Frankenstein monster breaking lose from the lab. It is a Frankenstein tale, after all.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
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, 51, 52
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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