Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 18
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
120/365: The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos, 2004) (Amazon Prime)
Before his untimely death, Angelopoulos explored the vast, bloody arena of Greek and Balkan social upheaval for more than 35 years, in a filmmaking style that takes Tarkovsky-Tarr traveling-shot poetry and ups the ante into the stratosphere. This epic, the first part of a trilogy that was never finished, shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players, Landscape in the Mist and Ulysses’ Gaze, but it’s a lighter film than usual, more musical and folktale-ish, more indulgent of old-school melodrama. The story is never fed to us pre-chewed, but instead occurs continuously on- and off-camera, passing before us like the steam engines that incessantly interrupt scenes and divide characters. It’s 1919, and a crowd of emigre Greeks return from Odessa after the Bolshevik Revolution; among them, a family with one son brings with it a young orphan girl, Eleni. Years pass in an unceremonious cut; a near-comatose teenage Eleni is brought home after having given up illegitimate twins. Another cut and the young woman is fleeing her own wedding — married not to the grown son, who loves her and helps her escape, but her aging stepfather. Literally trailing after these scrambling souls as they follow each other into the crossfire of the mid-century — world war, the revolution, the fascist junta, civil war — Angelopoulos’s massive real-time moviemaking keeps the mad tragic-Greek drama at a dreamy distance. Often, the director seems capable of coordinating entire landscapes, and weather, too — how did he manage to flood an entire plain, scores of square miles we’d already seen dry and supporting houses, for a single scene? The construction of emotional moments via editing and montage didn’t interest this man — instead, he’d do what it takes to move a mountain and make a vision or drama happen for real.
121/365: Death in the Garden (Luis Bunuel, 1955) (Mubi, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
A rarefied head-scratcher from the exhumed outlands of Bunuel’s world-class filmography, this sweaty, politically radical Wages of Fear-style jungle drama thick with expatriates segues into a lost-in-the-wilderness survival saga reminiscent of Herzog decades before the fact. But made in Mexico during Bunuel’s supposedly “overlooked” Mexican period, with a famous French cast (Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli, Charles Vanel)? In eye-popping color? One of many early Bunuels rarely if ever seen or made available since its scattershot release, the movie hums with the master’s jaundiced love of irrationality, seeping out of what is an ostensibly orthodox adventure tale, set in an unnamed South American craphole where diamond mines are the only industry and where French is the only tongue, and exploring the suffocating wilderness for the difference between it and the domains considered fit for human society. The action begins when the local government declares ownership of the region’s individual miners’ stakes, instigating a full-on (and gun-toting) insurrection that sucks in a wandering American tough guy (Georges Marchal), a malcontented hooker (Signoret), her old but good-hearted miner-beau (Vanel), and a naive priest (Piccoli). Nearly everybody except Vanel is a mercenary bastard, with the additional exception, surprisingly, of Piccoli’s reverend, who is so reasonable and humane that he may be the only cleric in the world’s most famous atheistic filmography who isn’t a vicious hypocrite. When the rebellion heats up and authorities clamp down the four hijack a boat and head down-river through the rain forest, into proto-Herzog wilderness. The “garden” of the title is Edenic only ironically. It turns out that Bunuel was no slouch in on-location action staging, by the measure of the 1950s — nature becomes a malevolent character on its own as it rarely did at the time. All the same, Bunuel will out, especially once the travelers begin to go mad in the wild and then discover the ruins of a crashed plane, littering the bush with inappropriate and useless objects.
122/365: Green Chair (Park Chul-soo, 2005) (OnDemandKorea, Amazon Prime)
Another gemstone from the Korean New Wave, this tempestuous, achingly lovely, slightly batty and overwhelmingly horny romance makes intimacy palpable in ways few American film has ever tried. The setup is news-story familiar: a thirtysomething woman caught having a sexual relationship with an underage teen. But the upshot is much more complex — the two energetic, vrooming lovers fit together like ragged puzzle pieces; they have *fun*, and gamble everything that society holds dear to be together, to test each other, to yank the most out of whatever time they can steal in each other’s naked company. Provocatively, we meet them as she, Munhee (Suh Jung, the infamous succubus from Kim Kiduk’s The Isle), gets released from her prison stint, greeted in the jail parking lot by a scandal-mongering news crew and by Seohyun (Shim Jiho), now strapping 17+ and heroically going public with his feelings, ready to whisk her away and pick up where they left off. This isn’t movie sex, nor is Park’s film “about” mere sexual obsession — Munhee and Seohyun talk in the middle of coitus, disappoint each other, get sidetracked, pause to eat, try to thrill each other with risk and sometimes fail. But the passion and generosity that lures them is always there, and always tangible to us, and so it never, ever gets boring. Their romance is a sincere but rocky road, ending up in a semi-surreal, semi-theatrical dinner party in which everyone they know, including their families, philosophically argues out the couple’s moral situation and potential future. The conviction of the actors is unwavering: Shim is utterly convincing and lovable as the self-assured soon-to-be-18-year-old, but Suh is the movie’s motor; her default position in her lover’s presence is astonished, doubtful, heartbreaking joy.
123/365: The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936) (Criterion Channel)
Guitry, long a household name in France, is little known here, but he was a vital contemporary of Pagnol and Renoir in the ’30s and beyond, a furious gadabout and story geyser who tirelessly produced plays, screenplays, movies, scandals and marriages for decades. (In a 1968 biography of Guitry, author James Harding acknowledges that in his primary research “the lips of Sacha’s surviving widows were, understandably, sealed.”) He began as a theater sensation and segued into cinema in fits and starts before crafting his first film, this irony-heavy farce, which is as stylized and idiosyncratic as any movie of the ’30s, shot MOS and told in flashback almost entirely by wry narrational voiceover. It’s also quite possibly the decade’s fastest film — Guitry careens through his amoral hero’s picaresque travails (punished for rectitude and rewarded for thievery, through romance, war and heists) as though it were a contemporary action film. Sardonic and fable-like, the film established a tone (amused, aloof, sharp-tongued and hedonistic) that Guitry would cleave to for many years, but what’s more remarkable is its measure of egomaniacal reflexivity — at the outset, Guitry signs his name as the master of ceremonies, and in lieu of a credit roll films his crew and cast acting out for the camera, simultaneously telling us “they know they’re being filmed.” (From whence came Welles’ Ambersons coda.) Insouciantly self-involved, Guitry (who resembled a Sephardic Barrymore with Criswell hair) counts on our own vanity for empathic cooperation, a la Wilde, and it still works like gangbusters.
124/365: Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1981/87) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube)
Only Kieslowski’s third fiction feature, finished just as martial law was clamped upon Poland in late 1981 and shelved by authorities for six years, this quantum meditation pioneered the idea, coopted like crazy since, of a film story branching out via happenstance and offering multiple possible narratives, each equally possible and none of them “true.” The young Boguslaw Linda stars as Witek, a medical student on leave, running to catch a train to Warsaw — which he catches, and then misses, and then misses again. Kieslowski’s concerns are not merely psychological or even metaphysical — Witek’s destinies are yoked inevitably to the climate of social existence in Communist Poland during the regime’s final decade. First, on the train, Witek falls in with an avuncular Party functionary, and ends up a willing agent of the system, inadvertently getting his own girlfriend arrested. Second, his missing the train eventually crosses his path with radical unionists and gets him embroiled with anti-Party activism. Thirdly, missing the train only reunites him with a med-school lover; a content family life and medical career follows, during which Witek is determined to remain neutral in his dangerously either/or landscape, only in the end to have happenstance kill him (rather spectacularly) anyway. Kieslowski was already attempting to leave what he saw as the mundanities of sociopolitical conflict behind, in favor of the more cosmic-moral mysteries he reached for in No End, Dekalog, The Double Life of Veronique and Trois Couleurs. But the structure of Blind Chance is insistently a defiant critique of the Communist era, made in the wake of the successful mass strikes of 1980 (explicitly referenced in the film) and the creation of Solidarnosc — only to have Witek’s own brand of crisis befall the film: first script-approved, then banned, then censored. Witek is not simply a fool of fate, but a model of the citizen allergic to ideology, who cannot survive or find happiness under totalitarianism no matter what side he chooses.
125/365: The Guatemalan Handshake (Todd Rohal, 2006) (Fandor, SundanceNow, Vimeo, Amazon Prime)
A truly ignored and eccentric American indie, Rohal’s film is an explosion of quirk, but it’s original enough in its cataract of details to keep us in a constant state of enchanted disorientation. Set in some Forgottentown, Pennsylvania, the film encounters characters undramatically, and its narrative gradually coalesces around them: Donald the triangular-electric-car-driving nebbish (Will Oldham), his pregnant girlfriend and one of “dozens of sisters, each with a different mother” (Sheila Sculin), Turkeylegs the willowy, surreal-minded 11-year-old free spirit (Katy Haywood) who narrates the film, Donald’s elderly and obsessive father Mr. Turnupseed (Ken Byrnes), a manic Guatemalan bus driver, a lactose-intolerant skating rink worker who may be the most socially inappropriate man ever devised for an American film, a woman in search of her lost poodle (whom we know got electrocuted by a power-station mishap early on, but who reconstitutes magically anyway), and so on. Early on, Donald disappears (literally, he just walks off-frame), and Turkeylegs’ endeavors to understand why and how, as her already dipsy community reaches several sorts of ridiculous yet dead-serious crisis points at once. Shot in deep, humid colors, the film is fairly unpredictable, and the wealth of mysterious touches (endless phone cords, unexplained band-aids, glimpses of a man running from bees, mundane miracles) suggest a fully realized magical realism just out of view, hidden by American poverty. This flyaway quilt needed glue, and it has it with Turkeylegs, whose point of view Rohal lovingly attends to, lending the project the periodic glow of a secretive, innocent child’s natural happiness.
126/365: Deluge (Felix Feist, 1933) (Archive.org, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Famously semi-lost, this extra-cheap pre-Code indie loomed large on the bucket lists of genre geeks for decades, largely by virtue of stills revealing its elaborate images of global destruction — hardly made less fascinating by their obviousness as miniatures. In fact, it vanished from circulation precisely because its imagery was sold off to Republic Pictures as stock footage for other films, leaving the extant film to founder without a rights-owner. It is in any event a richly cheesey and — miniature work notwithstanding — amateurish affair, in which the world is slammed (mostly via screaming headlines like “EARTH DOOMED!”) by a perfect storm of natural disasters, essentially wiping out civilization. The bathtub tsunamis blast through the dauntingly detailed tabletop skyscrapers early on, leaving us with a wilderness-of-Bronson-Canyon frontier drama, with our rugged hero (baby-faced Sidney Blackmer), separated from his family, surviving in a shoreline shack with water-logged wasteland in every direction, “40 miles from where New York used to be.” Other stragglers show up, including Peggy Shannon’s champion swimmer, and a mob of all-male predators, who leave at least one raped corpse in their wake. Eventually, a town rises from the ruins, and law and order (and family) get a second chance, with the help of a reproductive-crisis mandate: every woman must marry! Stiff and clumsy, the movie is still fascinating for its various genre-naive points of view, coupled with surprising pre-Code nastiness, sex and near-nudity, and those hundreds of tiny crumbling toy buildings, still quietly, strangely alarming after all these years.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
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
Keep up with Smashcut 365 by following Smashcut on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
What is Smashcut?
Smashcut is a next generation learning platform built for real time, media-based education. Smashcut partners with universities and organizations to develop and deliver customized, branded, media-based online programs. The Smashcut platform features a high degree of collaborative instruction, and real-time student project review via live 1:1 video sessions with instructors. We built Smashcut to help the next generation of students learn to communicate ideas and work effectively in a culture and workplace increasingly dependent on visual media and digital collaboration. Learn more at Smashcut.com.
