Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 20
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
134/365: WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, EasternEuropeanMovies)
Yugoslavia in the Cold War days was noted as the only European Communist country stubbornly unaligned with the Soviet Union, but in Makavejev’s gestalty vision Marxism, sex, capitalism, history, repression, freedom and social inhibitions are all crispy kindling for crazed dialectical bonfires. Makavejev’s signature mode was the confrontational schtick-documentary-surrealism-found-footage collage, and this fireball established the wacky, arthouse minigenre in the forebrains of ‘Nam-era college students all over the industrialized globe. (But not, unsurprisingly, in Yugoslavia, where it was banned for years.) The film began as a Ford Foundation-grant-subsidized documentary on Wilhelm Reich, the post-Freudian psychologist and culty sex theorist who was persecuted for his teachings in both Nazi-era Germany and in the U.S.; he died in an American prison, a victim of law-enforcement witchhunting and his own refusal to defend himself in court. Shooting in New York and Belgrade, mixing in copious Reichian footage, hunks of Communist propaganda films, and talking-heads interviews (sex-obsessed artists, Warhol factory star Jackie Curtis, surviving Reich disciples), Makavejev concocts a heady, self-contradicting, irreverent cocktail of collision, a messy paste-it essay on repression and liberation, as the two oppositive quantities are both represented by political power, by Communism, by sexual relations, and by history itself. “Mysteries” is right — Makavejev is no Communist nor is he fond of American values; two polar ideologies is never enough for him, and WR, in his nation’s proudest manner, is a thoroughly unaligned movie. Everybody gets slammed and celebrated (well, Stalin just gets slammed), and every dogmatic idea of the era is flipped to its B-side.
135/365: Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A German sine qua non of the very last explosive days of the silernt era, Pabst’s seedy landmark has been on the canon shelf ever since the canon was formed, and it deserves to be — a brooding, roiling whorl of shadow, menace and sexual manipulation based on Wedekind stories, the movie virtually epitomized the hyper-form of German Expressionism as Hollywood would later use it in film noir. Quentin Tarantino’s salute to it in Inglourious Basterds should be enough of a sell for newcomers — but don’t forget Uma Thurman’s wig in Pulp Fiction, a conscientious nod to star Louise Brooks, who as a man-eating Berlin prostitute immediately became one of cinema’s most enduring icons. (That black bob still shows up in films, whenever a female character is masquerading as a demimondaine.) From society-skewering slut-triumph to bad date with Jack the Ripper, Brook’s Lulu may be a femme fatale paradigm, but Brooks herself remains one of the most mesmerizing — not merely beautiful — actresses to ever meet celluloid. To see her is to experience movies almost on a chemical level.
136/365: Melo (Alain Resnais, 1986) (YouTube, Chili, Amazon Prime)
French New Wave vet Resnais crafted a career that few critics and cinephiles know how to approach — he began as the movement’s fashionable philosophe, with the epochal smart-cool splash of Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). By the ’80s, Resnais’s touch got lighter and less pretentious, and his attraction to movies-as-game-play became clearer. This four-character proto-melodrama (hence the title), based on a 1929 French play, is an ironic, self-conscious attempt at boiling down the primal elements of romantic tragedy into three absurd acts. There’s Marcel (Andre Dussollier), a famed concert pianist, visiting the domestic home of his conservatory-era pal Pierre (Pierre Arditi), and his young, elfin wife Romaine (Sabine Azema) — Marcel is a heartbroken loner despite his success, while Pierre is content and devoted. It’s Romaine that transforms, in the space of one long conversation, from a devoted spouse into a manipulating femme fatale, and from there, the sexual and emotional entanglements of the three (Fanny Ardant shows up later as the fourth, less crucial wheel) careen through betrayal, mental instability, marital espionage, suicide and even attempted murder. It’s an enveloping experience, filthy with rich talk and fascinating performances (you underestimate the cyclonic Azema, and then you don’t), and Resnais captures it in breathtakingly long, fragile takes, emphasizing the play’s theatrical nature only enough to suggest the theater’s quaint inadequacy in truly containing the firepower of romance and agony on display.
137/365: Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2006) (Kanopy, SundanceNow)
Guy Maddin needs no introduction, and no qualifications: crazed Winnipego, paleokino alchemist, obsessive fabulist, no-budget indie magus, and, in the new century, quasi-meta-autobiographer, in the suite of features that began with Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and landed, sweetly, with My Winnipeg (2007). This middleman in the aforementioned trilogy is prototypical Maddin, but something of a special case in its original conception: famously, it was intended as a live performance, with live music, Foley effects and various narrators. Here, Isabella Rossellini is the off-screen anchoring voice, backgrounding the adventures of “Guy Maddin” (played by several actors at different ages) as he returns to his childhood home — a lighthouse-cum-orphanage — and flashbacks to a traumatized, and extremely unlikely, youth, scrambled with Boys’ Own youth capers, an ogre-ish Mom, and his father’s mad-scientist lab experiments. Roughly the first decade of Maddin’s career was dominated by a bizarro fidelity to antique film styles, but here the the formal mode is more of a seamless hyperedited-but-old-style film world that exists on its own plane. The trilogy doesn’t quite look or feel like any other cinema, and yet they’re as simple as a folktale, and yet as hilariously puzzling as an ancestor’s outrageous lie that cannot be disproven.
138/365: Daytime Drinking (Noh Young-seok, 2008) (Amazon Prime)
A peripatetic gen-Z Korean comedy that’s as eventless, but as seductive and wistful, as a real afternoon boozing spree, seamlessly mustering the sense of waking up in strange places, of losing time, or forgetting why you are where you are, and just letting life carry you forward. (The context here is that, simply, South Koreans drink a lot, and drink a lot of soju, a cheap, sweetened vodka potion, consumed at the rate of almost seven gallons per adult per year.) Made for spare change, Noh’s movie hardly deviates from its title — it begins with a soju-soaked outing of four buddies; the rather lachrymose Hyuk-jin (Song Sam-dong) is suffering after a break-up, and the four agree to help him forget by meeting in a snowy seashore vacation town the next day, to party. Hyuk-jin buses in, but no one else does. Wandering around waiting for days, Hyuk-jin loiters, drinks too much, falls in with other wanderers, crosses paths too many times with the wrong people, and ends up waking up in the snow by the highway, without his pants. He wears several other characters’ clothes by the end, but this isn’t a raunch-comedy romp — rather, it’s as affectless and unassuming as its hero, and thus suggests early Jim Jarmusch even as it retains an unstructured looseness and a very Korean propensity for deadpan, peppered by drunken chaos. By his own admission, Noh is a modest first-timer finding his way, and the film ambles along organically, as if it kinda happen on its own, like a mushroom patch or blast of sunlight on a cloudy day. The complete absence of pretension or “connectedness” or character arcs feels like someone poured us a drink.
139/365: Sophie’s Place (Lawrence Jordan, 1986) (Fandor, Amazon Prime)
Jordan’s career as experimental filmmaker pivoted on a single deft bit of visual idea: taking the Surrealist reuse of 19th-century steel-cut engravings a la Max Ernst and Norman Rubington, and collage animating them into dizzying tornadoes of inexplicable beauty — a strategy that Terry Gilliam made into a ubiquitous joke (using instead airbrushed early photos) on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Jordan’s animated antiquaries may be the perfect “New American Cinema” gateway drug — they are gorgeous, epiphanic, figurative and ceaselessly inventive, and they never stop moving. This World’s-Fair-in-a-fever-dream masterpiece is as charming as it is inexplicable; Jordan’s sudden transformations (Victorian dandies are butterflies are hot-air balloons are locomotives are rosebuds are skulls) make no sense except for the only sense only movies can make: ecstatic, visceral, poetic sense. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Jordan’s film are particularly bewitching to children — the mixing of hundreds of antique images creates a breathless cataract of fantastic moviescapes where reason and scale evaporate and whim reigns.
140/365: Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944) (OK.Ru)
An only semi-celebrated entry in the Lang filmography, this early espionage thriller is a deft and absurd rack-table of circumstantial doubt, returning to the skyless urban shadowbox of the Mabuse films via Graham Greene’s tale of Nazi infiltration into the oddest and least expected corners of parochial British life. On the surface it’s a Hitchcock-style wrong-man scenario, but the differences are telling: Hitchcock’s world is simultaneously more naturalistic and more entranced in cinematic gamemanship, while Lang’s is blithely dreamlike, but also more mordant, more mysterious, creepily cut-and-dried about evil and its machinations. We begin with Ray Milland awaiting release from an asylum by, not promisingly, watching the pendulum clock tick the seconds by, and once he’s out he more or less immediately stumbles into a secret plot involving a fortune teller and a prize cake and a blind man who’s really not blind at all, right in the middle of a Blitz bombing. From there, Milland’s perhaps-unstable hero pursues the truth of exactly what had happened to him, and everywhere he goes he meets duplicity, ineptness, and shadows, weird charity organizations and seances and Dan Duryea as a patently unBritish British tailor dialing the phone with foot-long steel scissors. Names and faces double and vanish, and Nazi agents appear, almost imperceptibly, everywhere. Lang’s gift was his sly invigoration amidst his hyper-cynicism — his wise acceptance of the darkness — and Ministry is an almost jubilantly menacing film, with Milland’s defiant Everyman regarding even psychotics and murderers with relaxed disdain, and with the supporting characters (including Carl Esmond’s hilariously boyish Austrian, the indefatigable Percy Waram’s no-bullshit police inspector, and Hillary Brooke’s sexually savvy soothsayer) performing their story-tasks with an aloof joie de vivre.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
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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