Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 24
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
162/365: Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007) (Vudu, YouTube, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
A renowned Mexican provocateur, Reygadas makes movies that slow your heart rate and raise your anxiety levels at the same time, often via uncomfortably frank sexuality, and in his third film he decided to essentially remake Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, after a fashion, trumping Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves by several whispers, and setting it north Mexico’s extant Mennonite communities — making the film the first ever made in Plautdietsch, or Dutch-inflected Low Prussian. His strategy remains the same: employ non-pro locals (or in this case Mennonites from Canada and Germany as well as Mexico) more or less playing themselves, gaze upon the landscape as if it were Mars, use the waiting time in long shots like a cudgel. The set-up is simple for us, but for Mennonites (or so the film implies) it could portend the end of the world: a farmer and father of six is tortured by a long-standing adulterous affair with an otherwise virtuous neighbor, who’s also plagued with shame. The sense pervades that it is not just a trivial human triangle of misery, but either the act of God or of Satan or, the worse-case scenario, of individual devout man in Godless world. As unlikely as it may seem, Reygadas’s story becomes gripping, and the moral questions at hand are more complex than they seem — indications of blessedness and divinity are everywhere, but the structures of hyper-Protestantism can be seen as both suffocating and bucolic. The film’s visual personality is as fascinating as an Arctic ice crystal, gorgeous and unforgiving and intimidating, and the filmmaker routinely hunts down disarming moments; the film opens and closes with beginning-to-end dolly-portraits of sunrise and sunset, somehow unmanipulated by time-lapse. When the miracle arrives, you can actually see the blood return to the cheeks.
163/365: Detective Bureau 2–3: Go to Hell Bastards! (Seijun Suzuki, 1963) (Amazon Prime)
Nothing quite stings the throat and refreshes the nasal cavities like a Seijun Suzuki film; he had style to use up in a blue flame — typically, his wide screen fumed and dashed with ironic cruelty, surreal juxtapositions, inappropriate bursts of raw color, abrupt dolly shots, lovely ugliness, and raving performances. There’s a pervasive, party-hearty irreverence to Suzuki, howling out of this little-seen genre entry, just one of four films he made in 1963, like a siren. A double-cross-crazed gangster saga, it begins with a Pepsi truck shattered by gunfire, and a frame-filling burning car, and gangsters waiting outside a police station in broad daylight with “legal!” hunting rifles, in anticipation of a rival mobster’s release. (Later, scores of gang thugs with swords and rifles barrel around the city clustered on top of flatbed trucks, like revolutionaries, wading into battle.) Infiltrating one gang is a rogue detective the police are happy to use and let die, played by Suzuki avatar Jo Shishido. With his swollen, hording-squirrel cheeks and sloppy grin and melodramatic glare, Shishido is one of the most uproarious and distinctive action heroes in cinema history, here seen doing his own gymnastic stunts, and running from machine-gun blasts in a three-piece silk suit, and even getting roped into a cheesy nightclub song-&-dance. Like the movie, Shishido’s maverick never drives and stops when he can speed and skid (in a convertible sportster, naturally), and he is blissfully, kitschily iconic.
164/365: State of Siege (Costa-Gavras, 1972) (Vudu, The Criterion Channel, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon Prime)
There’s no underestimating the systemic shock Costa-Gavras provided to European art film with his first six films — suddenly we weren’t only concerned with Monica Vitti’s lostness or Truffaut’s empathic humanism. In a stroke, the European political thriller was born but also cranked with both the energy of genre film without any loss of realistic sophistication or based-on-fact immediacy, and the balls-of-the-feet pertinence of protest usually reserved for anti-war documentaries. This nervous, head-swivel, slam-cut filmmaking reinvented the idea of political film, and this boiler casts a cold eye on the mano a mano between homicidal dictatorship and grassroots terrorism-cum-freedom fighting. (The deeper irony still is that C-G shot it in Chile less than a year before the 1973 Pinochet coup.) Set in an unnamed Uruguay, the film’s rich political fabric — bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists, generals, double agents, citizens on the street — revolves around the young, floppy-haired Tupamaros kidnapping an American (Yves Montand), whom they know to secretly be a CIA spook responsible for training the government’s forces in assassination and torture. It doesn’t end well (based on the case of assassinated CIA torturer Dan Mitrione), but the filmmaker’s sympathies are clearly against the ruling class and their American henchmen, and the prescient scent of generational fury is in the air. The film is structured around a series of massive, roving rooftop-view tableaux of social militarization, as the army and police hunt the urban landscape for the insurrectionists; using real bystanders and routinely stretching for miles, it’s realism not only in detail but in scale, the sense of an entire society churning and eating itself alive.
165/365: From Morning to Midnight (Karlheinz Martin, 1920) (YouTube)
What we think we know about German Expressionism and how it began and how far it would go stylistically is ordinarily defined by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), but it was not alone nor was it the most extreme — that award might go to this neglected silent, nothing if not its own kind of stylistic seizure, far less Caligari-esque and ur-Gothic than imbued with a reckless, rebel-theater-nerd, rock ‘n roll punkishness, meant to invoke a crudely modern Now, and not, as was so common with the Expressionists, a creepy, tarnished 19th-century Then. The story is simple and, also typical of the movement, more than a little moralistic: a haggard bank teller, maddened by the drab routine of his days, absconds with the bank’s money in an effort to woo a foreign woman, and his escape from reality eventually drives him mad. (At every turn, he confronts a manifestation of the sullen-eyed actress Roma Bahn, as his daughter, a beggar, a whore, a Salvation Army worker, etc., and each time her faces transforms — subtle! — into a death’s skull.) Its form is its real distinction, of course — the rooms and streets the characters inhabit are meta-sets, little more than roughed-out school-play cardboard and curtains, conscientiously slopped with paint and cut at odd angles. As in the history of experimental theater, a room can be suggested by a single drawn window on black curtain; chicken wire and scrap lumber were Martin’s primary budgetary expenditures, poverty on display as a counter-cultural principle. Maybe it’s clear only in retrospect, but Martin’s movie appears to have far less in common with other German Expressionisms of the day than with Dada, and then with the uber-kitsch alt-culture styles that emerged more than a half-century later, from John Waters, the Kuchar brothers, Devo, ’80s New Wave music videos, “no wave” films, and the grungy vinyl-clothespin-&-hairspray fashion and art ideas inhabiting low-rent downtown chunks of every large city during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
166/365: Taxidermia (Gyorgy Palfi, 2006) (Here.tv, Sling, Amazon Prime)
This Hungarian trouble-maker is a certain kind of movie that doesn’t have a name — we could call it scato-absurdist-expressionist outrage comedy, with a lineage that stems back to the New Wave Czechs, Makavejev, Monty Python, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Roy Andersson and the Coens, not to mention Takashi Miike. Or we could just not bother, and savor the whiplash. A confrontational Rube Goldberg satire that packs three surreal dick jokes into its first 15 minutes, Palfi’s film plunges headlong into its own dialogue about Hungarian culture and the universal love-hate with our bodies, and the level of discourse is just as often lab-brat silly as it genuinely disquieting. But while plenty of revolted reviewers were happy to chide the movie for its sophomoric excesses, there’s no denying its uncompromising brio. Based on short stories by Magyar literary upstart-turned-major figure Lajos Parti Nagy, the movie is a triptych, essentially following a bastardized family lineage from WWII to the present, starting with a hare-lipped jerk who managed to emit a flame from his schwanz, and then to his errant offspring, an infant with a piglet’s tail (snipped off in close-up, of course). This Garcia-Marquezian urchin grows up in Communist Hungary to be the nation’s Fatty Arbuckle-ish champion in “sport eating,” the ordeal of which in Palfi’s imagining, complete with mass vomitorium breaks, is truly unlike anything you might’ve seen on ESPN. There’s more, buckets and reams and body cavities of it, and it can be authentically disgusting, but it’s a hot-blooded blast as well; when Palfi does take aim at a target — particularly Communist-era populism and its manifestation as hysterical, organized gluttony — he hits it with a bazooka.
167/365: The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965) (YouTube, iTunes, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
This is one of the keystone projects of Lumet’s initial hyper-dramatic period, when Actors Studio-trained thespians flared their nostrils in super-close-up, slate-sky black-&-white commanded the urban landscape, and Sociopolitical Meaningfulness was always right under the skin. This brooding, dark-dream chamber piece, released just a few years after the Eichmann trial, was one of the first instances of a Hollywood film seriously tackling the Holocaust in general, and absolutely the first to make the “secret society” of survivor trauma its primary subject. Famously, Rod Steiger is the bottled-up, post-menopausal Auschwitz alum managing a bedraggled pawnshop in Harlem, trying to keep order in his pennyante microcosm while being confronted with real people with desperate needs every day, and approaching implosion. In the mid-‘60s the film’s bulldozing, hyperbolic style had impact, but what’s vivid today is the degree to which Steiger’s Nazerman, because of his past, lives in an entirely different 1965 New York than every other character — and the film is eloquent about the separation. Steiger, with his sad eyes hidden by the shadows of his eyeglass frame, is most effective when he doesn’t fume and seethe, but the whole cast pales before the nuanced and crystalline sincerity of Geraldine Fitzgerald, as an earnest charity solicitor who seems to want more from the recalcitrant Nazerman than he can give. An Oscar-built pathmark in the growth of American postwar cinema, Lumet’s movie does not seem ageless, but it doesn’t need to as a fact of history.
168/365: The Cameraman (Buster Keaton & Edward Sedgwick, 1928) (Vudu, DailyMotion, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
You’d never know it, but The Cameraman was a bitch of a movie to make, being the first Buster Keaton made under his new contract at MGM, and the first with which he had to suffer the dumb know-nothing interference of a now-forgotten middleman producer (Lawrence Weingarten). MGM’s head man, Irving Thalberg, liked it well enough, but the political structure of MGM, plus the coming of sound, sounded the death knell for Keaton’s peak period, giving the film a sense of sadness and apprehension. It may not be a tour de force in the manner of Sherlock Jr. or The General, but take care to appreciate its variegated charms and achievements, from the proto-Jackie Chan stunts clamoring aboard the outside of moving vehicles, to the subtle (and, for Keaton, rare) explorations of contemporary social-sexual mores. Oddly, the metafictional possibilities of the film’s primary set-up — breaking into the nascent dog-eat-dog world of newsreel photography, that is, struggling to turn life into images in a manner that, in 1928, was brand new — are only hesitantly explored. Keaton’s archetypal nebbish-hero is first seen as an itinerant tintype photog, hawking the old novelty on the sidewalk; his eager transformation into a newsreel-man, in order to win the attention of the news firm’s secretary, leads to a cascade of comic debacles — an even thoughtful interludes, like a springtime idyll in which Buster finds himself alone in an empty Yankee Stadium, and pantomimes an entire home-run hit-and-dash for his own amusement, pretend-playing like the kid he always seemed to still be in some way. Virtually anything, cinematographically-associated or not, could find its way into its narrative, even the last act’s explosion of Yellow Menace racism, with our hero (now saddled, or blessed, with an organ grinder’s monkey, who handles some of the camerawork) suddenly in Chinatown, in the middle of an outrageous depiction of a Tong war. Amidst it all, there’s Buster, implacable and modest and therefore heroic. His searching visage is one of movies’ deepest invitations into their capacity for human involvement. Because he asks so much, we tip forward, to try to occupy his hope and despair.
Year Three 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
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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