Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 15
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
99/365: The Wind the Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, 2005) (Google Play, Amazon Prime)
The last of the red-hot neo-realist British-Marxist filmmakers and an international master, Loach has built a 50+-year career on attacking sociopolitical tension and upheaval, and here he finally tackles the Irish Troubles, in a kind of brother film to the ordinarily contemporary-minded Loach’s period portrait of the Spanish Civil War, Land and Freedom (1995). Set in 1920, this movie is methodical in its march through history: we begin with Cillian Murphy’s young doctor-to-be looking to flee Ireland to finish med school, before he is confronted too many times with British troops assaulting his countrymen. Once he takes his oath of allegiance to a Free Ireland, Loach’s film (written by longtime comrade Paul Laverty) follows this earnest naif from plotter to guerrilla assassin to low-rung politician, refusing to obey the Government of Ireland Act treaty that would soon enough pit Irish against Irish. The story takes classic shape: Murphy’s Damien sees family torn apart and fellow patriots and childhood friends felled in the fight, making him more and more resistant to compromise and more resolved to die for his cause. Loach’s objective, natural-lighting filmmaking is its own eloquent, humane statement, about history viewed as ordinary people’s lives, not as grand melodramas of the rich and powerful — why would anyone want to shoot period films any other way? Loach being Loach, the film is filled with revolutionary leftist cant, all of it sound and true and unimpeachable, and much of it concerned with Irish industry and economics — which is largely what the Republicans knew quite well they were fighting for, not merely for vengeance or justice. It may be the most observant and most authentic-feeling film ever made about the civil war (not that very many filmmakers have dared to begin with), and that Loach is a virtual godsend as a cultural voice.
100/365: The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928) (the Criterion Channel, YouTube, Archive.org)
Whatta you know: Von Sternberg’s Marlene Dietrich movies, which are slow and arch and gorgeous and extremely, knowingly silly, were a sort of departure for von Sternberg, who’d already worked on 13 movies before he met Dietrich, and who may’ve been first and foremost a silent film director. His half-decade before The Blue Angel was often regarded as apprentice time, years he spent learning what he might do once he met the perfectly photographable woman, but his silents are as richly shadowed and ornately crafted as the filmmaker’s sound films, and were widely recognized, and Oscar-awarded, as exceptionally beautiful and atmospheric works in their day. Nuanced, speedy, gravely emotional and respectful of its characters to a degree any von Sternbergian might find shocking, this sad anti-romance stars the late-Alec Baldwin-esque George Bancroft, who’s completely convincing as a ship stoker (you get a sense of how to do the job yourself when he’s through) and Betty Compson as a hopeless seaside tramp. Von Sternberg’s use of pregnant close-ups feels very New Wave, but watch the actors respond and wait for each other; it’s some of the most perfectly believable performances in any Hollywood silent. When Compson, impulse-married to Bancroft but watching him go to sea again, tries to thread a needle, we cut to a close-up of her hands that slowly fogs with tears. The film is brimming with old-fashioned tragedy (the kind rooted in character, not incident), and has von Sternberg finding new ways to say things without saying them.
101/365: The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel, 2008) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
One of the best and naturally least seen films of the 2000s, Martel’s third film is a masterwork of disconnection. Martel has routinely laid into the comfortable, well-pickled Argentine bourgeoisie she apparently knows so well, and this film begins at a simple afternoon outing, mothers and kids and cars. But right away, the framing and cutting and layered busy-ness suggest an imbalance, a lack of seeing clearly, an impending catastrophe — we’re not being fed expository information, but instead observing the smug, shallow, utterly real nouveau riche as they walk some kind of precipice. Vero (Maria Onetto), an aging bleach-blond wife and mother, runs over something on the way home. But does she? She’s not sure, either, but whatever happened it cut her loose from her privileged moorings. She stalks back into her life in a dumbfounded daze — is she amnesiac? does she remember the husband, the kids, the old boyfriend who seduces her? — and her discombobulation is so complete that her sleepwalk through rampaging affluence, where everyone is solicitous to her, becomes not only an existential dynamic but a political one as well. It’s worth remembering, because Martel needs no reminding, how small a percentage the SUV-driving, couture-wearing suburbanites represent in South America, surrounded by oceans of poor people just like the ones that landscape Vero’s garden. Martel keeps us as off-kilter as Vero, chopping up time and launching into traveling shots that imply wicked narrative torque but which are, finally, just as enigmatic to us as the moments are to the half-lidded heroine. The experience is electrifying; like a journey through an underlit basement or a strange neighborhood after dark — you’re wide awake.
102/365: Tales from the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu, Ioana Maria Uricaru, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu & Constantin Popescu, 2009) (Hulu, Amazon Prime)
Adding to the wealth of tragic-absurdist-comic material provided by the decades of Communist dictatorship, this impish, bemused Romanian omnibus epic is focused on a particular slant of the Ceausescu years — the “urban legends” that proliferated during the propaganda-mandated “golden age” of the 1970s and ’80s, mostly hilarious and unofficial tales of totalitarian ritual and enforcement gone beautifully, absurdly haywire. Omnibuses can be unpredictable and of variable resonance episode to episode, but the ideological purity of this collection — engineered by sole writer and co-producer Mungiu — rescues it from the genre’s scattershot tendencies. Consider this the New Wave’s Paris vu par… (The sole filmmaker of stature in the group, Mungiu apparently devised the film to give the four other filmmakers, whose credits had all been restricted to shorts, a shot at an international audience. Who directed which episode is not specified.) The result is a beguiling and sun-soaked dalliance in the rosier fields of an autocratic nightmare, beginning with a deft and razor-sharp portrait of a village attempting to prepare for an “official visit” and getting instead hung up on an endless carnival ride, and ending with the ultra-deadpan saga of a chicken driver in love with a roadhouse proprietor and suddenly flush with a bounty of accidental eggs. (Food is always an issue: one story involves the attempt to humanely and silently kill a gift pig in a tiny Bucharest apartment.) Some chunks are more pointed, and funnier, than others, but the confidence and wit of the filmmaking is quintessentially Romanian as we’ve come to know it.
103/365: The Last Stage (Wanda Jakubowska, 1948) (YouTube)
For most Americans who care, the Holocaust-on-film story runs something like this: outside of the release of newsreel footage after the war, and few tame references in quasi-noirs like Paris Underground (1945), the extermination camp phenomenon was too recent and too toxic for mainstream film, until Alain Resnais assembled Night and Fog (1955), and examination of the freakish period could begin in earnest. It’s a timeline that makes emotional sense, given the wholesale trauma involved, but it’s also far from true, as this Polish discovery proves. Wait, a film about life in Auschwitz, made less than three years after liberation of the camp, shot on location in Auschwitz itself, using real liberated prisoners as extras, filmed by a woman (female Polish directors in the ‘40s?) who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz just three years earlier? The style of the film is not ultra-realist — Jakubowska adheres to the classic Hollywood-ized style of the day, and the actresses (because the film focuses exclusively on women prisoners, recreating the director’s own tribulations) are usually too lovely and too carefully photographed. But the fact of the film’s unique authenticity hangs over the film like a cold front. You can’t forget the circumstances in which it was made, nor should you. The director has her shaky hands on what she seemed to already know was the most loaded real location of the 20th century, and she used it: the train tracks, the front gate, the Nazis guards lined up against the sky as the transports roll in, the inmate crowds so huge (thousands, at least) that Jakubowska could have only recruited extras from displaced person camps in Poland. The film is inevitably modest about torture and annihilation, however ungraphic, and a long montage panning over mountains of leftover coats, shoes, toys and prosthetic limbs is a breathtaker, especially when you realize the filmmaker might well have used the real detritus found at the camp. Fittingly, it’s an ensemble narrative, punctuating the female inmates’ day-to-say survival with the Nazi families’ ubermensch rationales and recreations, and every point you’ve ever seen scored in Holocaust narratives ever since was scored here first. But it’s more potent than that, because the spirit of the prison population is focused doggedly on resistance, on tracking the Allied Forces’ progress, on pulling together as women against a common enemy. Here, the Jewish women (along with Gypsies, Communists and female Russian soldiers) do not quake in their socks, but plot an uprising.
104/365: The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda, 2008) (Mubi, Criterion Channel, Fandor, Amazon Prime, Kanopy)
The one major woman filmmaker at work in the French New Wave, Varda was for ages a sturdy, generous, and astute female sensibility in a messy film culture usually overtaken with masculine whim, and watching this late swan song is quite like contemplating the world over wine with an anarchist aunt. It’s an unabashedly octogenarian revery, in which Varda daytrips through her life, accompanied by hordes of friends and family, trapeze artists, actors playing out scenes from her life (there are a half-dozen or more little Agneses), beachcombers, cats, potatoes, Chris Marker’s cartoon cat avatar (as per usual, Marker does not put himself on camera, but we do get a vintage photo, stepping off a motorcycle in a leather jacket), and so on. If at times Varda seems to be indulging herself, you can hardly blame her, and, anyway, the entire thrust of New Wave thinking demanded that movies be as free and impulsive and elusive as life. In this case, it’s an 80-year-old’s life. The material is dominated by a rueful contemplation of time and aging, and of the necessity for the artist to relentlessly build his or her own life, and by the memory of Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, who died in 1990 and with whom she shared her best years making movies and growing a family (two activities that Varda heroically conjoined). Along the way, we get Alexander Calder, Jean-Luc Godard (sans glasses!), Alain Resnais, Jim Morrison, Jane Birkin and Laura Betti doing Laurel & Hardy, tons of film clips (from both Demy’s and Varda’s filmographies), the story of the making of Jacquot (perhaps Varda’s best movie) with Demy as he was slowly dying of AIDS, children and grandchildren, graveside eulogies, etc. It’s less a movie than a warm little nugget of life-stuff in your hand, and by the end you feel as though you’ve made a friend.
105/365: Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagisa Oshima, 1968) (The Criterion Channel)
Oshima was the Japanese New Wave’s most recalcitrant barn-burner, a world-class pain in the ass, whose ’60s films were like a set of cherry bombs tossed down our film-culture toilets. This obscure object bears a knockout title disguising an absurdist goof assembled around political screed, about how the Japanese has oppressed its Korean immigrant minority. The widescreen schtick begins with the three titular idiots, gamboling Monkees-style, going swimming only to have a mysterious hand pop out of the sand and replace their clothes with Korean duds. From there, they are persecuted and pursued (why? “Because we’re them.” “Oh, yeah.”), captured, shipped out to war and back, constantly changing clothes in order to better conform but never quite succeeding. Then Oshima’s ace card, and the justification for his title, arises: after a documentary fissure where the characters interview people on the street (who all say they’re Korean), the entire film begins again, at the beach, often using the same shots but gradually separating from the first half, as the three heroes cease resisting being defined one way or another ethnically but instead embrace however they’re perceived. By the end, after the three goofballs suggest that they remember the first half and reenact in multiple ways the famous Nguyen Van Lem execution photo, they barely know what they are. “Let’s go back to the beach and redo it,” one grumbles, complaining like Godard figures that the film they’re in was “made by some stupid Japanese director.”
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
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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