Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 2
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
8/365: The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012) (Amazon Prime)
This landmark documentary explores present-day Indonesia, and everything about it the rest of the world doesn’t know much about — namely, the legacy of the mid-‘60s unrest that produced the toppling of Sukarno’s Communist dictatorship, and the anti-communist backlash that swept through the islands and gave ad-hoc militias free reign to murder virtually anyone suspected of leftish leanings or support. (Upwards of a million people were killed.) Today Indonesia is a bustling and corrupt kleptocracy, and those old militias survive as popular and powerful public institutions, but we’re not prepared for when the smug homicidal veterans of the old slaughter get in front of Oppenheimer’s camera (as well as on national TV, and in front of their own grandchildren) and proudly crow about how many people they “brutally” slaughtered via beheadings, drownings, strangulations, etc. In their own beleaguered heads, these famous codgers remain “gangsters,” a term they say in English translates to “free men.” The nation’s entire security infrastructure, protecting its industries and government and emitting non-stop propaganda, is founded on reservoirs of blood, and is still run like the Mob. Oppenheimer recognizes immediately the self-glorifying nature of the culture, and the native love of American movies, and from the outset he invites his aging but blithely life-loving subjects to help shape the film, and to literally reenact scenes of torture and genocide for the camera. Oppenheimer’s film becomes a record of the production of these “films,” in which the paramilitary vets “play” themselves in their youthful butchering days but also start playing victims, too, covered in clumsy gore make-up. The killers watch the video afterwards and critique their own performances — and often ask for a reshoot. There’s a full-on neo-noir episode, with fedoras and silk suits; a western, visualized like a campy mix of Sergio Leone and John Waters; and shimmery sub-Bollywood tableaux that, given the context, make your jaw drop. These self-aware cutthroats become the movie stars they always felt they should be, but of course outside of their propagandized bell jar the playacting hijinks and boastful legacy is a terrifyingly absurdity.
9/365: Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
A sweaty, saucy, often stagebound war of romantic wills, this classic early talkie posits a slew of seminal figures and patterns — most pervasive of which is the Hawkisan banter battleground, where men and women in extremis talk at each other as equals and as self-entertainment, before and after the sex that preoccupies their quick-moving thoughts. Hawks had nothing to do with Red Dust, but his signature worldview borrowed from it for years to come — the entire quadrangulated, class-conflict love-vs.-fate set-up was lifted wholesale for Only Angels Have Wings seven years later. The details are classic white-man’s-burden edge-of-civilization pop existentialism: an Indochinese rubber plantation, monsoons and tigers and coolies and scant underwear, a sense of lost futility, and casual sex. Proudly pre-Code, this hothouse barely shrugs in the direction of euphemism, with Jean Harlow’s braless, on-the-run prostitute saying she’s “not used to sleeping nights” in her business, and only misting up a little when Clark Gable pays her for a night on her back, when she was hoping “it wasn’t like that at all.” Gable became Gable here, so robustly and callously macho (he was barely 30) that we, like the characters the film, are simultaneously attracted and repelled by him; the two personas know well that they are made from the same base clay, and Gable’s attempt here to intercept distracted visiting wife Mary Astor (practically melting with sexual helplessness) from her nitwit research scientist hubby Gene Raymond is merely a detour, a self-destructive folly from which he will eventually be saved, by the prostitute’s low-class honesty and his own surrender to destiny. It’s lovely, scratchy, mannered pulp, like its characters teetering on the edge of propriety and saturated with the romance of having already used up your heart and deserving to be outcast in the wilderness.
10/365: Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, DailyMotion, Amazon Prime)
Arnold’s debut feature owes its genesis to the Danish Dogme 95 “movement,” but its use of visual technology, and the perspective of robotized surveillance visuals, though British, is universal. We’re introduced to Jackie (Kate Dickie), a bony, haunted middle-aged woman working as a monitor to Glasgow’s plethora of CCTV surveillance cameras. Her life is otherwise an empty shell; her tether to humankind is in being an official voyeur, taking pleasure in children, sympathizing with the owner of an ailing dog, and getting off surreptitiously observing back alley sex. Arnold is assiduous with her visual choices — the frames of the surveilled feeds structure the story — and things shift into high gear plotwise when Jackie spots a familiar face : the post-coital mug of a man she’d hoped never to see again. So she keeps watching, and begins entering the frame herself, as it were, revisiting places where she’d seen him and eventually crossing over into his social sphere. Resonant and atmosphere-saturated, as well as a welcome update to Rear Window, Arnold’s film withholds its heroine’s motivations and thoughts for a very long time, gratifyingly — not knowing reflects eloquently back on how much she doesn’t know, as we do not, about the lives she watches on her bank of video monitors. The subterranean story that surfaces isn’t quite as juicy as the air of voyeuristic mystery that precedes it — the laws of genre storytelling demand that be so — but the palpable air of invaded privacy and risk helped the movie win a Jury Prize at Cannes.
11/365: L’Innocente (Luchino Visconti, 1976) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Poetic economy was never among Visconti’s priorities; many of his most famous films lumber in straight lines like elephants on a leash. This final work, then, came as a surprise — and something of a worldwide hit, due most probably to the degree that the director’s high-hat Euro-pretensions made Laura Antonelli’s nudity seem almost artful. But the movie cooks narratively, thanks largely to Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s layered novel and veteran screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico’s good sense to follow it: Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini), a late-1800s aristocrat, is married to the pliant Giuliana (Antonelli), but nakedly pursues a parallel life as a skirt-chasing libertine, virtually bragging to her about his new love for a widowed countess (Jennifer O’Neill). As the characters are subsumed in Visconti’s characteristic forest of interior bric-a-brac — Antonelli’s voluptuousness is only rivaled visually by the relentless fleur-de-lis wallpaper — Guiliana engages in her own infidelity (off-screen), and Tullio’s sense of control begins to collapse. In an almost Hemingwayesque fashion, the couple tiptoe around the real subject at hand, and because the drama is subterranean, we watch leaning forward, and wait for the eruption. When it comes, slow like a long fuse, the film becomes a razor-sharp dissection of masculine privilege. Visconti’s touch is startlingly nuanced (the scene played out while Antonelli wears a gray funeral veil stretched across her face is unnerving), and Antonelli, as unpracticed and anxious and unsure of herself as Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, makes the whole drama stick to the wall like glue.
12/365: Remorques (Jean Gremillon, 1941) (Criterion Channel)
Gremillon is one of cinema’s great journeymen, migrating from playing violin in a silent-movie house to making documentary shorts and eventually graduating to features, any features, by the time he was 26. He was a major player in the “poetic realism” trend of the ’30s, but here we have one of the three films he made during the Nazi occupation, when French films were micro-analyzed for anti-German subversionism and filmmakers that didn’t work for the Nazi-run Continental Films ran the risk of getting deported to the camps. Gremillon skirted the crisis like many did, and the film defies its oppressive context by being intensely, feverishly French. The movie (translated as Stormy Waters) is particularly dark and swoony, having been begun on the cusp of the war and then finished, with the German’s acquiescence, two years later in 1941. Co-written with Andre Cayette and Jacques Prevert, it’s a fatalistic romance about rescue-salvage sailors, opening at a wedding that’s unsurprisingly interrupted by a sudden storm and a stranded vessel out at sea, compelling the men to scramble out into the darkness and do what they do routinely — risk their lives. Jean Gabin is, naturally, the captain, and this latest near-scuttle nearly costs him his ship, but it also places his tense marriage to Madeleine Renaud in jeopardy, after the evil ship-scuttler’s disenchanted wife (Michele Morgan) appears and initiates a fated romance with the impregnable man of integrity. Gabin, with his so-relaxed-he’s-at-home-in-bed manner, his boxer’s nose and weary duffel-hammocked eyes, makes the film compulsively watchable as always, even if the story feels driven by unspoken whim. In fact, the story’s rich with the French lack of impulse control, and this is perhaps why it baffled the German censors, who may well have thought right-minded audiences would find all of this frivolous behavior distasteful.
13/365: Happy End (Michael Haneke, 2017) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Our patron saint of existential chill, Haneke returns to trecherous terrain — family, bourgeoisie narcissism, class conflict, latent psychopathy, the viewing of life through screens — and starts off in a typical mode, on the smart phone of an unseen and unheard kid, recording her mother covertly at home and dropping Instagram Live-style texts into it about what a selfish bitch she is. Cut to a hamster in a cage, which we are similarly informed has been fed some crushed pills; in seconds, the hamster drops dead. “Voila,” she types. Next, we see mom, prone in the next room, and we fear the worst. Which is where Haneke goes, in this novelistic exploration of a self-poisoning family of wealth and industry, but not before the very next sequence: a minute-and-a-half anamorphic shot of a massive construction site. We don’t know why we’re watching, and then we do, as a cement wall spontaneously collapses, taking a porta-potty with it, and the hapless immigrant worker apparently inside. It all intersects within a rather Trumpian family, centered on the elderly patriarch (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is on the edge of dementia and knows it, and is looking for a way to finally die. Other members wrangle with addiction, adultery, and blackmail; in the wings lies that comatose Mom, who may well have been poisoned by her wounded 12-year-old daughter. You have to assemble this portrait on your own; Haneke’s style is cool and elliptical, and he conscientiously leaves a lot of connective narrative tissue and exposition out, making you lean in, searching for secrets. His primary fascination is with the cultural decay wrought by secrets and guilt, and every now and then, as with Cache and Code Unknown, his canvas goes wide, and the open secrets of France itself are on the block.
14/365: The North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943) (YouTube)
A remarkable fossil from the brief span of war years in which Hollywood actively made pro-Soviet agitprop to aid in the war effort against the Axis forces, this independent super-production of Samuel Goldwyn’s, scripted by an under-contract Lillian Hellman, is stuffed with faux-Soviet choral-rally songs written by Aaron Copland and Ira Gershwin, all anti-anti-Communists whose lefty politics would become less fashionable at war’s end. Nominated for six Oscars, the film was a big hit in the day, even if its sunny portrait of life on a bustling Ukrainian kolkhoz, complete with tractor worship and exultant musical numbers, plays as a stupefyingly unironic clone of contemporaneous Soviet movies, down to the field-&-sky compositions and dancing masses. More than a little surreal, then, to have Dana Andrews, Walter Huston and Anne Baxter, in Russian peasant duds, join in with the Communism feel-goodism (singing! strumming a balalaika!), at least until the empty skies start ominously roaring with German bombers. Which is when Milestone, so good at the stress of war, comes to life, as Erich von Stroheim’s wehrmacht platoon occupy the border village. Hellmanesque moments poke out of the mayhem, as when the village’s mamas morosely linger before setting their own homes on fire. There’s no shortage of death and sacrifice, as the villagers get mowed down by the soldiers (not a common sight in movies before this) and turn into partisans to resist the onslaught (it’s the only film you’ll ever see Jane Withers stand and blow away Nazis with a rifle). It was Life Magazine’s Film of the Year, but by 1945 few wanted to remember it fondly, and it was only evoked years later once the HUAC hearings were under way, as evidence of Commie subversion. Fun fact: come 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, a self-protecting Goldwyn pulled it out of mothballs, had a half-hour of collective-farm warmth and music cut from it (as well as any mention of Russia at all, leaving the characters’ homeland a vague Eastern European locale), and slapped on an archive-footage coda, with narration lamenting the Communist scourge that followed the film’s trials. The result, titled Armored Attack!, is a bizarre example of history literally remaking itself in Hollywood, and trying to send its earlier convictions down the Orwellian memory hole.
Year Three Archive: Week 1
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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